Microsoft has announced the availability of three of its products intended for developers: Visual Studio 2022, .NET 6 and PowerShell 7.2. The former brings with it a big update, bringing 64-bit performance to Microsoft’s main integrated development environment. It can be accessed and downloaded through its official page.
The new version of this development environment, announced a few months ago, incorporates all kinds of improvements, mainly focused on facilitating the transition from an idea to its coding, speeding up the latter and improving productivity. With 64-bit support, for example, Visual Studio 2022 can take advantage of modern hardware to scale and support larger and more complex projects.
One of its improvements is IntelliCode, an AI-assisted coding plugin, which allows developers to code more by writing less code, as it is capable of completing entire lines of code. Another of its novelties is Hot Reload for .NET and C ++, which provides the opportunity to update running code and immediately see the results of any changes made.
Visual Studio 2022 also has new tools that improve internal debugging and productivity. Thus, it offers command line details, as well as a process tree view with a parent-child system. It also has the option “Select running windows from the desktop” in the “Attach to process” box. On the other hand, Web Libe Preview provides a new designer for Web Forms projects, and features the Cascadia font and new icons.
On the other hand, Visual Basic refactorings help developers write more efficient and correct code. Visual Basic also has new capabilities, such as subword navigation, designed to make coding easier. On the other hand, Visual Studio 2022 already supports cross-platform testing on Linux.
Regarding the news of the development platform .NET 6, also available for download from its website, it also has Hot Reload, Web Live Preview and cross-platform testing on Linux. In addition, as it is a version with long-term support, you will have it for three years. This new version is the first that will have compatibility with macOS Apple Silicon, in addition to having compatibility with Windows Arm64.
.NET 6 has OpenTelemetryas well as improvements to Visual Basic in the Visual Studio experience, as well as to the Windows Form project experience. It is capable of rendering Blazor JavaScript components and has WebAssembly AOT compilation for Blazor WebAssembly apps. In addition, it incorporates support for HTTP / 3, support for symbolic links in the input and output of files and support for Open SSL, with the ChaCha20Poly1305 encryption scheme and with deep defense mitigations at runtime. Among its novelties there are also source generators and analyzers.
As to PowerShell 7.2, is based on .NET 6 and will also be supported by Microsoft for three years. In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements, PowerShell 7.2 incorporates various enhancements, such as new APIs for use in scripts. In addition, it now includes integration with Microsoft Update for automatic updates, as well as predictive writing for PSReadLine 2.1, that is, with Predictive Intellisense.
Furthermore, ANSI support has been improved, including a new built-in variable: $PSStyle. It is responsible for facilitating the addition of decoration to scripts or cmdlets, among other elements. It can be downloaded and installed from its section in the Microsoft store.
