Visual Studio 2022 17.8 Preview 3 is here!
Welcome to Visual Studio 2022 17.8 Preview 3! This release is dedicated to addressing community submitted feedback where we resolved nearly 100 Developer Community tickets. Our primary focus was improving stability and reliability while also introducing a few new features.
Productivity
Visual Studio Update Notification
Noticed something new? For Visual Studio 2022, we added an overlay to the VS task bar icon to help you know when VS will update. When there is an update available and you have enabled the “Update on Close” option, the icon will appear. Once you close VS, an update will immediately start and as a result the icon will also disappear. For more information on Update on Close, please visit VS Update on Close .
C++ Game Dev
Unreal Engine Macro Specifier Suggestions
You will now see Unreal Engine macro specifiers suggested in the member list, making it easier to understand and use them in your code. This feature will save you time and effort by providing quick access to important information about macro specifiers, without having to leave the IDE.
Structured Diagnostics
C++ compiler errors can be long and unwieldy. To address this, we’ve created a new Problem Details window which allows you to navigate compiler errors in a structured way. The Problem Details window can be opened by clicking the Details icon for an entry in the Error List.
Entries in the Problem Details window can be expanded to view nested information about the error from the compiler.
MDS 3.0 to MDS 5.0 Upgrade in SQL Server Data Tools
SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) has upgraded from (Microsoft.Data.SQLClient)MDS 3.0 to MDS 5.0. MDS 5.0 has some significant benefits over MDS 3.0. It has added support to TDS 8.0, support for specifying Server SPN and Failover Server SPN on the connection etc. Please refer to this blog for more information on the benefits of the upgrade.
For SSDT users, the major change that can be noticed is while connecting to a database. Two new fields, namely: Encrypt and Trust Server Certificate have been added to the Connect Page. This specifies the Encryption type and the requirement for a Trust Server Certificate. By default, the Encrypt is set as true or Mandatory. You can find details about this in our Microsoft Learn Documentation.
Share your feedback and stay connected with Visual Studio!
We appreciate the time you’ve spent reporting issues/suggestions and hope you continue to give us feedback when using Visual Studio on what you like and what we can improve. Your feedback is critical to help us make Visual Studio the best tool it can be! You can share feedback with us via Developer Community: report any bugs or issues via report a problem and share your suggestions for new features or improvements to existing ones.
Stay connected with the Visual Studio team by following us on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitch and on Microsoft Learn.
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32 comments
How do I actually download it? I can’t find the link.
Visual Studio Installer > More > Update Settings and select Update Channel : Preview
While this method will work, please note that it will permanently set that particular installed instance to get all its future updates from the Preview channel.
If, however, you want to install the Preview version side by side on the same machine as a production release version, you can find a link to the preview installer on the “Available tab” of the Visual Studio Installer. That way you can have both your production ready fully supported release version AND the preview (which provides peeks at the upcoming functionality in the next minor release) version installed and available to be used on the same machine simultaneously.
Welcome page removed? 😢 I was rather hoping for an update to the welcome page.
Agreed, the new Welcome page was starting to shape up and it’s a surprise to the reversion to the old one.
Install Start Page+ which is even better to use:
https://www.vsixgallery.com/extension/96b389fd-48b6-48d9-bbf2-ec6ebd026b14
I have to agree the “Welcome page” was way better than the old “Start window”, It’s so sad to see this being reverted, at least give us the choice!
Please, for the love of all holy, good, and true: address your Razor tooling. I am attempting to build a startup with your technology and your tooling is suddenly the biggest risk of my success. Everyone who told me that it’s not possible to build companies on Microsoft technology is starting to be proven right. 😭
I have been accepted into Microsoft for Startups and am living my dream of building a startup on Microsoft technology, but at this point, I am having serious doubts if I will make it, due to the absolute churn and disruption that I am encountering with your software.
Currently, if I press a key in my solution using Preview 3, it will take nearly 100 seconds for the CPU to idle:
https://github.com/dotnet/razor/issues/8371
There is another issue that was introduced in Preview 2.0 where GC sweeps occur with frequency in Razor files:
https://github.com/dotnet/razor/issues/9395
There is ANOTHER issue where a single keypress will incur a 40-second build time in a Razor-based csproj. I myself can tolerate this but any other developer that I try to hire will think this is madness and will quit before they even start.
https://github.com/dotnet/razor/issues/6919#issuecomment-1702455259
Hi Mike-E,
Thanks for sharing your feedback and I’m sorry you’re experiencing these Razor issues. The Razor compiler and Razor tooling that depends on the Razor compiler are being completely overhauled to address systemic architectural issues in Razor (both in compiler and tooling). We realized that it’s impossible to keep fixing these Razor issues unless we change the compiler and tooling architecture. This is a big change, but both compiler and tooling teams are making good progress. Once that lands, we expect Razor experience to improve significantly.
We also just created a ticket on the Developer Community that we’ll update with Razor editor improvement info as we make progress: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Razor-Tooling-Issues-in-178-Preview-3/10490592
STILL, STILL, STILL TRIPLE-QUOTES STRINGS DO NOT WORK IN RAZOR EDITOR!!!
Hi Eugene,
Thanks for sharing your feedback, and I’m sorry you’re experiencing this problem. We are aware of the string interpolation and raw string literal-related issues, and we hope to have it fixed in the 17.9 timeframe. You can stay updated on this issue here: https://github.com/dotnet/razor/issues/7084
Thank you, Leslie!! 🤩
What the heck did you do to the VS WMI classes? After updating the preview and also the release, the MSFT_VSInstance class does no longer exist in the WMI catalog. WTF?
PS C:\Users\wks1> Get-CimInstance MSFT_VSInstance Get-CimInstance : Invalid class At line:1 char:1 + Get-CimInstance MSFT_VSInstance + ~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : MetadataError: (root\cimv2:MSFT_VSInstance:String) [Get-CimInstance], CimException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : HRESULT 0x80041010,Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.CimCmdlets.GetCimInstanceCommandcheck your Windows update, I got an update called “Visual Studio Client Detector Utility” from Windows update.
It is used to detect the current versions of Microsoft Visual Studio on client computers, and to determine whether an administrator update applies to those clients.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/kb5001148-visual-studio-client-detector-utility-for-administrator-updates-ad593454-547c-43c3-b5a3-6f201ae63f03
Nope, all up to date. tried to download the VSCD manually from the MS site, it reports a newer version is already installed. And no VS WMI class in sight. And I have the same issue on two totally different PCs, work and home.
We had to move the VS WMI class into its own namespace because the root namespace was getting corrupted and causing our Administrator updates to not recognize Visual Studio instances installed on the machine.
Try this syntax:
Get-CimInstance MSFT_VSInstance -Namespace root/cimv2/vs
Online documentation updates will be available soon at https://learn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/install/tools-for-managing-visual-studio-instances#using-windows-management-instrumentation-wmi and at the KB article that Andre links to above.
Wow, that actually works, but this is quite a breaking change. Any application that relies on the default namespace wont work anymore. Quick look at github shows that there are quite some that uses it.
Release notes definitely needs a “Breaking changes” section.
Thanks for clarifying.
It would be really nice if you listed breaking changes at the top of your Release notes…
Doing a Blazor App and this no longer works:
You now have to use:
This is the post for VS 2022, not ASP.NET Core. You should post your comment over there (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/asp-net-core-updates-in-dotnet-8-rc-2/) However I’ll also point out that they discuss it in their post and how to map from the old to new syntax.
True, but I didn’t expect the Visual Studio update to update the .NET 8 RC without at least mentioning that it was going to do that.
First version in a long time that I’ve had to roll back.. At least that’s easier now.
For me the entire editing area was stuck in light mode, no matter what theme was selected. Just the code editing area. And it didn’t even get that right as intellisense tooltips were in some mixed hard to read theme.
Reported and demonstrated in feedback and the rollback fixed everything. 🙁
Actually if i run a single project in my solution i can choose the project and the relative configuration, if I switch to “multiple startup projects” i can’t select the relative app config any more.
I’m wondering when will be possible to select the relative app config in multiple startup project (actually i can only select which project to start and relative debug mode).
Every time i need to switch configs i need to exit multiple project mode select the single project, then the desired config and run almost 1 time the project to keep the configs and then go back to multiple project configuration? Come on, it is a true waste of time!
I don’t remember the last job with single project solution, every “basic” serious solution has at least frontend and API project, i bet that the main part of professional programmer around the world will ask the same.
It is always good to get Preview updates but this update for me is broken; it’s back to the VS 2022 Production version. I am disappointed as I have been able to productively use the Preview edition for months now.
In the Blazor Web App template only “Individual Accounts” Authentication type is available. When will “Windows Authentication” please be added?
This update broke text editor color application.
https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Sort-order-of-classification-definitions/10491437
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/RSRP-494341/Color-syntax-highlighting-broken-in-VS-2022-Preview-17.8.0-Preview-3.0
The new extension manager doesn’t appear to be capable of updating extensions. At least for my GitHub Copilot Chat extension, it never updates after multiple attempts including after closing Visual Studio.
Will there finally be a designer for .NET MAUI?
Without a designer .NET MAUI is utterly useless.
So what’s the status on #include cleanup which was meant to drop in 17.7? My last information was that it was delayed due to instability so when is this getting addressed and re-enabled?
Save visual BASIC.
Not make the error to discontinue it.
Will the compiler tools needed for producing an x86 CHPE image be ever released? (I’d like to compile plugins for 32 bit applications that will never be recompiled to native ARM)
The x86_chpe definition stuff seem to be available in Windows headers and I guess MSFT also compiles their x86 chpe system dll’s so the tools are there.
But, is it planned to be released to the public?