Visual Studio 2019: Code faster. Work smarter. Create the future.
John
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 2nd) 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.
74 comments
What features are missing from the community version of Codelens
Hi, the References, Application Insights (Requests and Exceptions), and Test (Test Status and Tested By) CodeLens capabilities are now available in the Community edition of Visual Studio 2019.
I hate to say it, but just as I said a few months back, this has been a rushed release.Case in point1) I’ve raised a bug for this. It’s only minor I grant you but shows a lack of care/attention to detail: Upgrade from VS 2019 RC4 -> RTM. Then open the help, about box. Visual Studio 2019 is still showing RC on it’s version!!Not only that – all of the start menu entries (e.g. developer prompt) still refer to RC. This is at best sloppy, at worse, confusing.2) Someone else has raised a bug for this. Can’t remember the details of it, but it relates to VS 2019 RC4 creating incorrect .map files for debugging (I believe from memory that parts of a pointer address are being swapped around).3) What is being done about significant outstanding bugs in VS 2017, that are regressions? – eg used to work until update 8, that have been fixed in 2019, but there are cases where for both technical and/or engineering/legal reasons, people can’t move from 2017 to 2019.Case in point, there’s a bug that prevents preprocessing a file via /EP if the file has #import in it – the compiler crashes.There are other significant (regression) crashing bugs in VS 2017, that are marked as fixed/closed, just because there’s a fix in 2019. That’s no good for people who can’t yet move to 2019.As I said back in February. This has been a rushed release. You (Microsoft) announced a launch date before you’d even released the first RC build. The fiasco and wasted time/arguments of the menu bar redesign surely must have wasted a LOT of time that could have been dealt with on other things.
I’ve been following the VS 2019 preview since the first preview, but for me (using it for VB projects) its been so broken, its unusable, until preview 4, only recently released. You couldn’t pause your code to edit it, and check in for Azure DevOps was broken. Reported other little bugs only to have them closed as ‘low priority’. This didn’t stop the plethora of “Give us Feedback!!!!” dialogs pop up, which were always ignored.
Overall, totally disappointed and frustrated with this new ‘version’. As Mike has commented, its been rushed, with feedback given simply ignored. Updating now only gives me Preview 5 with a comment of, “yeah, we’ll fix that later”. This just slaps of “we don’t care about your issues. You’ve paid us, like what you’re given. Or use Notepad.”
For the issue with Azure DevOps check in, do you have Developer Community logged that we can follow up on? If so can you paste a link here in the thread?
Where would I find the list of changes for Test Manager. Or were there none?
Hi David,
Microsoft Test Manager and Feedback Client are no longer shipping in Visual Studio starting Visual Studio 2019. You can use Azure Test Plans (part of Azure DevOps) for manual and exploratory testing.
Well, that is disturbing! Is there any means of converting TFS based test plans to Azure Test Plans and bring over all history and maintain links to work items and changesets?Have to spend some more time with Azure Test Plans, but on first sight it strikes me as if QA was once again a total afterthought. This is just frustrating! I guess we are stuck on buggy MTM 2017 for years to come.
I took some time to explore Test Plans and it is as crippled as the web portal for test in TFS. This is rather unusable for what we need to do. There appears to be no means of seamlessly transtion to Test Plans, the query capabilities remain grossly inadequate, and the many pieces of feedback to MTM were not incorporated. This isn’t any different than the current TFS based test portal. I cannot find how to review test result history and the test run panel constantly drops to the background. It really shows that developers created this and not QA folks.If this isn’t the best channel to voice my concerns then please let me know how to engage with someone who is interested in critical and constructive feedback. The established channels seem not to work.
Hi David, apologies for the delay, but here’s the response I got from the engineering team:
It is the same Test Plans capability that ships in both Azure DevOps Server (formerly TFS) and Azure DevOps Services (formerly VSTS). If you wish to move from TFS to Services then consider this migration tool. We are ensuring you lose no functionality in the move from MTM to Test Plans. See this. There would be no data loss either. With respect to your feedback on experience and capabilities please write to devops_tools@microsoft.com so that we can get into an active conversation. Azure Test Plans is being actively worked on and your feedback will help make it better.
‘Find all References’ still doesn’t look in .cshtml files, and razor formatting is still broken.
ooh, but the menu is in the title-bar. glad you have your priorities straight…
In Visual Studio 2019 Find All References, as well as CodeLens, should be able to find methods in .cshtml. (This was added in Preview 1) Could you file a bug on the behavior you are seeing? https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues Thank you!
2019 and still no reasonable tool to customize menus. Still ugly icons :-(. Even worse – icons for debugging has changed to absolutelly unrecognizable ones. Can we just get the VS2010 icon set back? Not everybody is color-blind!
Microsoft, why are you doint this to us!?
Hey Jan, I’d love to talk with you more about the menu customization. The existing experience is admittedly sub-optimal, and we’d like to do something more. Can you connect to me directly? DanteG at Microsoft.com.
So when creating a new Xamarin project, you no longer have the UWP option, is it now dead ?
Visual Studio 2019 version 16.0.1 was released today which includes a checkbox that enables you to create a Windows (UWP) project when using the “Mobile App (Xamarin.Forms)” project template.
What happened to the plan to include the full Sql Server Data Tools (SSRS, SSIS, SSAS) in the VS2019 installer? This was asked in the comments of the VS2019 announcement blog post and the answer was that it was going to be included in the installer. I installed VS2019 and selected the SSDT option but got the same stuff as with VS2017, no SSRS, no SSIS.
I’d also like to know what’s going on with SSDT in 2019. Is it dead, or will it be enhanced??
hello Nerk
With Visual Studio 2019, the delivery model for SSDT (Database projects/IS/RS/AS) has changed. Documentation is being updated as we speak.
In short, for creating Database projects you dont need to install any additional tools other than selecting “Data storage and processing” workload during install.
For IS/RS/AS projects, you just need to install the appropriate extension from the marketplace.
Thanks for the response. I can see AS and RS in the “Manage Extensions” window but I can’t find IS. Would it not be an idea to either rename “SSDT” in the installer to something else as what people expect from SSDT is IS/AS/RS not just creating DB projects OR include the extensions in the installer under SSDT so users don’t have to go searching for them – or write comments on blog posts asking where they’ve gone.
Hello Nerk
Thanks for your feedback.
We have updated the SSDT documentation at –https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssdt/download-sql-server-data-tools-ssdt?view=sql-server-2017 to describe the changes that have been made across versions of VS and the evolution of “SSDT”. Hopefully that clarifies things.
Will Database projects, SQL object explorer, and table designers be receiving any enhancements in the future? …they are very slow when using a remote DB like Azure.
Hi Dean.
We have open work items to address connections to Azure. Please stay tuned.
When full release?
Hi Maksym, you can download the full release on https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/ as of April 2nd.
Is it possible/planned to update installed Preview versions to the RTM? Currently, the Preview don’t show an avaiable upgrade.
Hi Julius, John recently published a blog post explaining the two different channels we have: preview and release (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-2019-release-candidate-rc-now-available/). The preview channel will get updates to the Previews, while the release channel (which we made public with the Visual Studio 2019 Release Candidate) will get updates to the generally available version and future (non-preview) updates. This means that you will have to install the generally available version of Visual Studio 2019 separately, but you can keep running the Preview side by side if you’d like.