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April 2nd, 2019

Visual Studio 2019: Code faster. Work smarter. Create the future.

John Montgomery

Corporate Vice President

Visual Studio 2019 is generally available today and available for download. With Visual Studio 2019, you and your teams will become more productive in building current and future projects as you benefit from the innovation in the IDE that makes every keystroke count.

As we’ve shared earlier, Visual Studio 2019 improves on Visual Studio 2017 in a few areas. It helps you get into your code more quickly by making it simpler to clone a Git repo or to open an existing project or folder. It also introduces improvements to the template selection screen to make it easier to start a new project. While you’re coding, you’ll notice that Visual Studio 2019 improves code navigation and adds many refactorings, as well as a document health indicator and one-click code clean-up to apply multiple refactoring rules. There are also improvements to the debugging experience, including data breakpoints for .NET Core apps that help you break only on value changes you’re looking for. It also includes get AI-assisted code completion with Visual Studio IntelliCode.

These capabilities work with both your existing project and new projects – from cross-platform C++ applications, to .NET mobile apps for Android and iOS written using Xamarin, to cloud-native applications using Azure services. The goal with Visual Studio 2019 is to support these projects from development, through testing, debugging, and even deployment, all while minimizing the need for you to switch between different applications, portals, and websites.

Check out the launch event

Be sure to tune in to the Visual Studio 2019 Launch Event today at launch.visualstudio.com, or watch it on-demand later, where we’ll go into a lot more depth on these features and many others. During the launch event, we’ll discuss and demo Visual Studio 2019. We’ll also share content on Visual Studio 2019 for Mac and Visual Studio Live Share, both of which are also releasing today. There are also almost 70 local launch events around the world you can join today and over 200 between now and end of June. Thank you for your enthusiasm about our best release yet.

To help kick-start your experience with Visual Studio 2019, we’ve partnered with Pluralsight and LinkedIn Learning to bring you new training content. Pluralsight has a new, free, Visual Studio 2019 course (available until April 22, 2019). A path and skill assessment are also available, so you can dive right in. On LinkedIn Learning you’ll find a new course (free until May 2^nd) covering the highlights in Visual Studio 2019. Of course, you can always head over to VisualStudio.com and our docs to find out what’s new, or dig into the release notes for all the details.

Thank you for your ongoing feedback

We could not have made this happen without you. Ever since we released Preview 1 of Visual Studio 2019 in December, we’ve received an incredible amount of feedback from you, both on what you like and what you want to see improved. As always, you can continue to use the Report a Problem tool in Visual Studio or head over to the Visual Studio Developer Community to track your issue or suggest a feature. We’ve made many tweaks and improvements along the way to address your feedback, rest assured that we will continue doing so in minor releases going forward.

We want to sincerely thank you for taking the time to provide the feedback that we use to shape Visual Studio 2019 into the best developer environment for you. We can’t wait to see what you’ll create with Visual Studio 2019.

Author

John Montgomery

Corporate Vice President

John is Corporate Vice President of Program Management for Developer Tools and Services at Microsoft. He is responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, .NET, C#, C++, F#, VB, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Go, Node.js, Python, Engineering Systems, User Experience Design, Customer Research, Windows tooling, and Azure tooling. John has been at Microsoft for 17 years, working in developer technologies the whole time.

74 comments

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Sebastiao C. Pereira June 6, 2019 0

Visual Studio 2019 is not to be used in production environment yet, is in a phase that requires us to do the Quality Control for Microsoft. There are a lot of malfunctions and little bugs and error messages. It is weird a company in the software industry that does not care for the quality of its products, it is not the RTM version, at least call by the correct name like beta or maybe alpha...
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Visual Studio 2019 is not to be used in production environment yet, is in a phase that requires us to do the Quality Control for Microsoft. There are a lot of malfunctions and little bugs and error messages. It is weird a company in the software industry that does not care for the quality of its products, it is not the RTM version, at least call by the correct name like beta or maybe alpha versions.

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Michael Easterbrook May 16, 2019 0

Why is that I can open a Web Site but I can’t create one? I am using Visual Studio 2019 16.0.4 and am trying to create a Razor site. I can create a new site in VS 2015 and then open it in VS 2019, but there must be an easier way.
efe özkel April 20, 2019 0

thank you good post really like.
Andrew Innes April 11, 2019 0

I have downloaded the new 2019 and am getting used to it. No complaints at this time.
However there are some things I would love to have.
1 Better handling of panels in a desktop development screen. When running the programs panels work great, so we are using them more to keep the number of screens users need to go to down to a minimum. As you know this reduces training issues significantly. ...
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I have downloaded the new 2019 and am getting used to it. No complaints at this time.
However there are some things I would love to have.
1 Better handling of panels in a desktop development screen. When running the programs panels work great, so we are using them more to keep the number of screens users need to go to down to a minimum. As you know this reduces training issues significantly. But when developing the screen with panels, I find I must move them around all the time in order to work on them. I also constantly have to move them forward and back and if you leave them in the wrong order things can get messed up on the screens. Also if one accidently lands one panel inside another with all this moving, that causes panels not to show in full. (They are limited by the size of the container they are in).
It would be great if one could have panels always be independent of other panels (and not be put inside another panel) and a way while programming to move them forward or back without impacting their actual location when the program is running.
2. I prefer to code in VB.NET because it is easier in nested programming to follow where a process ends than it is with just a ) or } at the end of the nested process. We find the debugging is easier.    More and more when I go into documentation I have to convert the C# answers into VB. That is very disappointing. (Cut and paste C# into VB is not so great). So please be sure the documetation on VB is being provided.
3. It would really be great to allow the use of VB.NET and C# syntax in the same programs…maybe even the same forms or modules.
   It just does not seem difficult to create a compiler that would be able to read either one correctly. Yea, if someone adds a } instead of an end if in a vb if statement that would throw an error as mixing syntax.    But if the next end if is done in C# is it not easy enough for the compiler to pick that up?    C# and VB already share the same code base, so there would be no change on that level. Vars could be defined in either a VB format or a C# format and the compiler should be smart enough to pick that up also and use either definition properly. But wow would that be a simple way for programers to use Microsoft either code and work together on projects! It would also perhaps be helpful if Xamerin worked with VB and maybe this is the way to do it?
I have always enjoyed the use of Visual Studio for building solutions. I am very pleased to see Microsoft increasing the number of products supported in Visual Studio. Over all you do a great job.
Thanks.

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Sandro L. M. Barbosa April 8, 2019 0

Hail Visual Studio 2019! Hail Montgomery and Team!!
Mike Diack April 8, 2019 0

John,Out of sheer frustration (and because us users of VS cannot reach you directly), can I ask you to take a look at the flurry of VS 2017 bugs that are closed BUT NOT fixed. I cite a few examples below. In many cases these are regressions - features that used to work in earlier VS 2017 builds that don't any more (typically update 8 broke a lot of stuff for a lot of people)....Read more
John,Out of sheer frustration (and because us users of VS cannot reach you directly), can I ask you to take a look at the flurry of VS 2017 bugs that are closed BUT NOT fixed. I cite a few examples below. In many cases these are regressions – features that used to work in earlier VS 2017 builds that don’t any more (typically update 8 broke a lot of stuff for a lot of people)….
Please ask him to look at the number of existing regressions (yes, once working features in VS2017) in VS 2017 Update 8, that have NOT been fixed again as of 2017 Update 9.11.
Users are now being directed by your tech support staff to install VS 2019 instead, this is just NOT good enough, particularly for users who cannot for tech/legal (e.g. compiler validation) reasons yet update to 2019.
There is REAL frustration voiced at the VS feedback sites about the stuff broken by VS 2017 Update 8 and not yet fixed.
See: “C++ console application with MFC/ATL doesn’t compile” (by Shawn Fox) as just ONE example, but there are many! Thats been open since Aug 2018See also: “Files using all of MAX_PATH not handled correctly by Find All” – i.e. under some circumstances, “find in files” doesn’t work!

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- Sean April 8, 2019 0
  
  Hi Mike,
  Thanks for sharing your feedback experience. We are taking steps to improve our response and resolution to regressions. I have flagged “C++ console application with MFC/ATL doesn't compile” to the product team to take a second look. I couldn’t locate “Files using all of MAX_PATH not handled correctly by Find All”. Would you mind sending me a link so we can follow up on that too? To share any additional input about feedback,...
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  Hi Mike,
  Thanks for sharing your feedback experience. We are taking steps to improve our response and resolution to regressions. I have flagged “C++ console application with MFC/ATL doesn’t compile” to the product team to take a second look. I couldn’t locate “Files using all of MAX_PATH not handled correctly by Find All”. Would you mind sending me a link so we can follow up on that too? To share any additional input about feedback, you can reach me at seiyer at microsoft.com
  Thanks
  Sean
  
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Sanjay Shenvekar April 8, 2019 0

Hi John,
Just downloaded VS 2019 (released on 2nd April). Looks fantastic!!
one question though, Can I migrate and deploy my aplications from VS 2017 to VS 2019 on Production? I mean does VS 2019 can be used as an IDE to develop and deploy application on production?
I got mix answers about it and would be great if you could clarify this a bit.

Regards
Sanjay Shenvekar
- Sebastiao C. Pereira June 6, 2019 0
  
  Wait for a stable version of Visual Studio once there are a lot of small bugs and malfucntions. Actually VS 2019 is not RTM yet besides it says so!
Johan Donné April 7, 2019 0

When will VS2019 be available on Azure Devtools for teaching?
Jim Little April 5, 2019 0

Wouldn’t it make more sense to sort these comments in descending order by date??? Especially because after you post, your posting seems to have disappeared when it actually is at the bottom of a list that you have to click several times to get to… Arrgh!
Jim Little April 5, 2019 0

Lots of self-congratulation going on here by Microsoft, but the quality of Visual Studio 2019 sucks. Does Microsoft still do any QA testing? What are the product/program managers doing--playing video games all day?
I downloaded the entire payload in order to make an offline installation Blu-Ray disc using this command (as detailed here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/create-an-offline-installation-of-visual-studio?view=vs-2019):
vs_community.exe --layout c:\vslayout --lang en-US
After two days due to the horribly slow connection Microsoft offers to its audience,...
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Lots of self-congratulation going on here by Microsoft, but the quality of Visual Studio 2019 sucks. Does Microsoft still do any QA testing? What are the product/program managers doing–playing video games all day?
I downloaded the entire payload in order to make an offline installation Blu-Ray disc using this command (as detailed here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/create-an-offline-installation-of-visual-studio?view=vs-2019):
vs_community.exe –layout c:\vslayout –lang en-US
After two days due to the horribly slow connection Microsoft offers to its audience, I ended up with a whopping 26 GB (yes, that’s GIGABYTES) of data that I couldn’t burn on a regular Blu-Ray disc–I needed a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc. Then I thought I had everything I would need to run vs_enterprise.exe from that disc, but nope. I disconnected from the internet and ran vs_enterprise.exe (also tried vs_setup.exe) but only got about 2% in before a popup appeared that some files were needed and that I wasn’t connected to the internet. WTF??????? Is there no offline setup? I wasted two days of downloading to find out that my offline installer is in fact NOT an offline installer?
These sorts of issues make Microsoft a very annoying company. This product should be offered to MSDN subscribers (or anyone else with a license) as an ISO disc image that WILL WORK OFFLINE.
What’s the deal?

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- Sebastiao C. Pereira June 6, 2019 0
  
  I agree with you 100% and I learned not to install new version and uninstall the previous one.
- Cathy Sullivan April 8, 2019 0
  
  Hi Jim,
  I’m sorry to hear you had problems generating an offline installer. Our engineering team (Heath is one of those engineers) can definitey help you get the issues you’re experiencing issues sorted out. The best way to get in touch with us is by using the “Report a problem” icon in the upper right hand corner of the Installer. Someone should get back to you very shortly.
  Thanks! Cathy
- Dean Jackson April 6, 2019 0
  
  Ha ha…welcome to their new world 🙂
  I would reach out to Heath Stewart, who runs the blog related to Setup/Install issues with Visual Studio. The blog is at: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/setup