Visual Studio for Mac 17.4 is now available

Iain Holmes

November 8th, 20220 6

Visual Studio for Mac v17.4 is available today! This release includes improvements to the editor like the new Editing State margin and the return of the Class pad, and fixes for issues that users have reported. We’re also releasing our first preview of Visual Studio for Mac 17.5 for people to see what we’ve got planned. 

To update now, use the Visual Studio > Check for Updates… menu in the IDE. If you aren’t using it yet, download it now: 

 

This blog post summarizes the top changes in this release. You can check out the release notes to learn about all the changes we’ve made. 

User interface improvements to keep you in your flow

Since the 17.3 release we’ve been investing in improvements in Visual Studio’s shell to enable developers to work more efficiently and effectively. You’ll find the following changes that keep you in the flow and help you be more productive than ever: 

  • In the document area, you can now float documents into separate windows or have documents in a side-by-side layout.

An animated image showing the editor. Two tabs are open and the second tab is foremost. The second tab is dragged and detached from the tab bar. As it is dragged over the editor a split window indicator appears, showing 3 options, left, center and right. The center option is disabled. The tab is dragged over the right split indicator and dropped. A new editor containing the dragged tab opens beside the first editor

  • The Class Pad has returned, making navigating and understanding project architecture quicker and easier than before.
  • Output tool windows, such as Application Output and Build Output, now follow your font settings. 
  • Improvements behind the scenes help make the Solution Explorer and the Dock Layout system faster and more stable.

Find what you need quicker in the editor 

In the editor, we made improvements that help developers find what they need quicker: line spacings in the editor can be changed to improve readability, and the current line number has been highlighted to help find your position in the text editor quicker. 

Animated image showing the Line Spacing settings. There is a slider labeled Less on the left and More on the right. Below it is a text area showing some example code. As the knob of the slider is moved towards the right, the spacing between the lines in the text editor gets larger

You’ll also find the Editing State Margin in the lower right corner of the editor. From here you can quickly see the current line and column and change the leading whitespace and line ending characters. 

Editor State margin, indicating that the caret is on Line 66, column 13, the indent whitespace is Spaces and the new line character sequence is a line feed character

Entries in the breadcrumb selector are now paired with icons to help you find the method, field or property you’re looking for at a glance.

Image showing a section of the pathbar popup menu. The entries have an icon beside them indicating their purpose

Finally, the Hex Editor has made its return to help you view and edit binary files. 

Image showing the new hex editor. The hex editor is split into two sections. On the left are the hexadecimal digits in groups of 2. On the right is the ASCII representation of the file

Be More Productive with the Debugger 

We’ve added the ability to restart the current application during debugging, reducing the clicks necessary to get back into your debugging session. You can access this feature from the debugging toolbar. 

An image of a section of the toolbar showing the run button, the configuration selector and the debugger button bar containing the new Restart debugger button

A new Modules tool window has been added to allow users to quickly see what modules their application is loading. 

Image showing modules window. There is a table with details of the loaded modules

Use the latest languages and features 

We’ve made investments in the project system to help you create more code the way you want to. You’ll find .NET 7 support for Azure Functions and MAUI as well as support for archiving and publishing your MAUI apps. 

We’ve also added support so you can bind your MAUI app to native iOS libraries and edit your project properties. 

And for those of you that want to use the latest C#11 features – including raw string literals, file-scoped types, list patterns, and more – Visual Studio for Mac 17.4 now supports the features of C#11.  

 

Visual Studio 17.5 Preview 1 is also available

Today, we’re also shipping the first preview of our next release – Visual Studio 2022 for Mac v17.5. You can install this release side-by-side with the v17.4 release – if you already have a preview version of Visual Studio for Mac on your machine, you can use the Visual Studio > Check for Updates… menu to update to this next preview as well. You can also install it using the preview installer: 

In the 17.5 series we’re working to improve Git workflows, improved font handling, .NET 7 support and improvements to the Unit Test and Output windows as well as accessibility improvements throughout the whole application. We’re also looking at rolling out Hot Reload and LSP support. 

In Preview 1, we’ve switched to running on .NET 7 for some performance improvements and you’ll find improved font support for some fonts that were previously unable to be used, like Cascadia Code Semi Light.  

Image of the text editor showing the font Cascadia Code Semi Light

Please keep sharing your feedback 

We hope you enjoy using Visual Studio for Mac 17.4 and that it helps you to be more productive in your development. Your feedback has been instrumental in the evolution of Visual Studio for Mac! Please continue to share your thoughts and keep sending those suggestions or problem reports.You can use the Help > Report a Problem or Help > Provide a Suggestion menus to share feedback or go to the Visual Studio for Mac Developer Community site to vote for your favorites. 

Iain Holmes Senior Software Engineer, Visual Studio for Mac

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