Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2 is out!

Justin Johnson

We’re excited to announce the second preview release of Visual Studio 2022! Preview 1 was the first-ever 64-bit Visual Studio, delivering improved scalability. Starting with Preview 2, we’re focusing on delivering new capabilities on the themes of personal and team productivity, modern development, and constant innovation. In this blog we’re going to highlight a few of the new capabilities of Visual Studio 2022. We’d love for you to download it, try it out, tell us what you think, and join us in shaping the next major release of Visual Studio with your feedback.

Developing for everyone

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Here on the Visual Studio team, we’re committed to that mission for developers.

Our first preview of Visual Studio 2022 included a new font that’s easier to read, Cascadia Code. In our second preview, we’re improving Visual Studio usability for everyone with updated icons that are clearer and easier to distinguish.

Side by side comparison of Visual Studio 2022 icons

While Preview 1 was available only in English, Preview 2 is fully localized. You can choose from over a dozen language packs: English, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

Developing modern apps

Applications and the developers who build them are critical to the success of companies across the world. And businesses are expecting even more from their applications as part of their digital transformation. Delivering on those expectations means building applications with the latest technologies. With Visual Studio 2022, we are building tools to both support your existing applications and tools to help update and create new applications with ease. Delivering success for you, your business, and your customers.

Preview 2 comes with the latest version (v143) of the C++ build tools, which are binary compatible with previous C++ toolsets shipping with Visual Studio 2019 and older. This new toolset is available with both Visual Studio and the standalone Build Tools installer. Upgrading your C++ projects to take advantage of the latest IDE and toolset improvements should be friction-free.

In addition to being the best place to develop modern Windows apps with C++, we’re adding capabilities to make Visual Studio the best place to build cross platform apps. With Preview 2, we’ve extended our cross-platform capabilities, adding new CMake integration and seamless targeting for WSL2 – with no need for manual configuration.

For .NET developers, Visual Studio 2022 will be the place for you to build Blazor and .NET MAUI applications, using C# to build the next wave of web, mobile, and desktop applications.

Personal and team productivity

As we talked about in the Visual Studio 2022 vision blog, an important area for us is delivering innovative features that revolutionize development. Starting with Preview 2, you’re going to see new productivity capabilities in Visual Studio.

As developers, much of our time building apps is spent on iterative changes and running the application to inspect those changes. This process is time-consuming and frustrating. Making the simplest change can take minutes. Preview 2 offers new Live Preview experiences for both XAML and web apps. You’ll be able to make those iterative changes to your application in the editor and see the difference in real time. No more recompile-and-run when you just want to nudge something by a pixel or two!

Live preview for XAML

The new Web Live Preview is the next generation of web designers for ASP.NET. Web Live Preview adds tools to make web design more approachable. And you can see the changes you make live in the IDE, even with data-bound controls!

Web live preview demo

On top of reducing friction in your edit/debug cycle for design elements with Live Preview, Visual Studio has new capabilities to help you more effectively debug code. Say hello to Force Run, a new debug command that runs your application to a specific point, ignoring any other breakpoint or exception. Force Run is great for getting out of loops which have breakpoints.

Innovation at your fingertips

Another crucial part of our vision for Visual Studio 2022 is unlocking your potential as a developer with truly innovative capabilities. In Preview 1, we shipped IntelliCode whole line completion. And with Preview 2, we’re updating Hot Reload, including support for C++ apps! With Hot Reload, you can edit C++ or .NET projects while your application is running. In many cases, you can apply those code changes without pausing your app. To use Hot Reload on a running application, select the “Apply code changes” button in the toolbar.

Location of the "Hot reload" button on the Visual Studio command bar .

How to help preview Visual Studio 2022

During the preview period, Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2 is free for anyone to use. We encourage you to download and use the preview just like you use Visual Studio 2019. (You can also install them side by side, if you like.) Then let us know how it’s going. We’re grateful for everything that you share with us via Developer Community, Report a problem, and surveys. Your input helps us to make Visual Studio 2022 the best developer experience for you.

Before we go

This is just the beginning—there’s still more to explore with Preview 2. Over the next few weeks, we’ll roll out new blog posts that detail many of the new capabilities of Visual Studio 2022. (If you’re eager to see a full list now, head on over to the release notes.)

43 comments

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  • Max Mustermueller 0

    I’ve tried 2022 but I noticed literally zero performance improvements on loading a large solution comparing to 2019. Also code search takes for some reason much longer especially when you search in “entire solution”. The Xaml designer still throws exceptions in certain cases (when using custom controls and many resources from resource dictionaries). Especially its broken when you open a Xaml which requires resources from a resource dictionary which you load in code. Overall it feels exactly like 2019, with all its pros and cons.

    • Brien King 0

      But they have new ICONS!!!!

      I’m sure 2022 will continue to have lots of bugs like 2019 does, but at least the icons will look pretty…

    • Eugene Ivanoff 0

      I do agree with you. I didn’t notice speedup at all. What I noticed is more bugs. For instance, trying to see project properties throws error. The only way is… to edit .csproj file. Hello, Notepad!!!!

    • Robert Strand 0

      I have a solution with 224 projects, and it loads it in seconds, you might have some csproj files with issues in them.

  • Rod Macdonald 0

    Can I please ask if Web Live Preview is just for .NET Framework (WebForms) and if Hot Reload is for .NET Core (Blazor/Razor) i.e. are they 2 separate tools or are they merging into one, and are these/is this in VS2022 P2? Thank you. [edit: the video suggests there are actually x3 tools including one for XAML]

    • Sayed Ibrahim HashimiMicrosoft employee 0

      Web Live Preview is currently limited to .NET Framework projects. Later we hope to bring Web Live Preview to ASP.NET Core projects, but there is still other work that needs to be done before that. For ASP.NET Core there is Hot Reload, these are different components with some similarities. Web Live Preview is more than just a live previewer, you can also use it to design your web application with a drag and drop experience. I will be publishing a blog post here tomorrow on Web Live Preview and the new Web Forms Designer (powered by Web Live Preview).

      • Rod Macdonald 0

        Sounds really good, Sayed. I would love it for the WebForms designer and Core HotReload to be on a par with the WPF designer – CSS stuff like FlexBox and Grid can be really difficult! Just found your blog so looking forward to a good read – cheers!

  • Jan KrassniggMicrosoft employee 0

    Very cool! The C++ hot reloading sounds like it could be really useful. Does it work for any C++ code, or only for certain types of projects? Does it work with individual DLLs ? E.g. if I have an application running, that has a certain DLL loaded, can I hot reload just that DLL ? And what types of changes are allowed? I’d assume only code logic within functions, but not class layout modifications, right?

    • Marian LuparuMicrosoft employee 0

      Great to hear! Please give it a try and let us know how it works for you, including what code change limitations you’d like us to revisit.

      C++ Hot Reload uses the C++ Edit & Continue tech, so the same capabilities and limitations transfer to Hot Reload as well. To answer you specific questions:
      – it works with any codebase compiled with the MSVC toolset, as long as you have /ZI compiler switch on.
      – it works on both EXEs and DLLs and it will not cause a full DLL reload. When EnC is on, code changes are injected by the debugger dynamically
      – for a more complete list of code changes allowed and not supported, see this reference documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/supported-code-changes-cpp?view=vs-2019

      We will have a more detailed blogpost on this soon, so stay tuned 😉

      • Jan KrassniggMicrosoft employee 0

        Awesome, thanks for the information! Looking forward to a more detailed blog post 🙂

      • Paulo Pinto 0

        What about IDL tooling improvements for XAML applications and COM?

  • Mark Harmer 0

    I don’t see the C++ v143 tools listed in the “Individual components” of the Installer for VS 2022 Preview 2. There are only 3 listed for “v143”: clang-cl and UWP support for ARM64/ARM64EC.

    • Marian LuparuMicrosoft employee 0

      Mark, it looks like a bug in the VS Installer. Thanks for letting us know.

      If you install the default C++ Desktop workload in Preview 2, the new v143 toolset will be available in the “Platform Toolset” property in the C++ Project Properties for any C++ project. I’ll follow-up internally to fix the string in the Installer to say “v143” instead of “v142”.

  • Super Coco 0

    Nothing about to restore the famous disaster chaos mess of the “New Project Dialog” and the “Start Window”. Please restore the old “New Project” dialog and the old “Start Page”.

    Nobody understands how Microsoft has destroyed these two elements that all users liked and that nobody had complained about. No one had demanded a “New Project” dialog or a new “Start Window”. The only reason would be to justify the version change to 2019.

    Things like this completely destroy a good product.

    • hitesh davey 0

      I completely agree with you. For the New project dialog; VS team has reinvented a wheel by changing the shape from “Circle” to “Square”. Not sure how they approved the design concept in the first place and forcing the VS users to use it! A new dialog screen is such a waste of time, money, resource, and efforts put in.

  • Jason Baginski 0

    Fun fact, for this whole “hot reload” business. I manage quite a few classic asp.net sites. Since they are still “Web Site” projects rather than “Web App” projects, I can use file explorer to drop new aspx and resource files as I please. I “debug” in release mode. As soon as I hit save, I just navigate to another part of the page or hit refresh and my changes are there. There might be a second of delay. It’s only when I need to actively need to trace something that I recompile for debug mode(very infrequent, maybe four times a month). It’s 1,000% the reason I never “upgraded” these projects to “Web app” and why everything feels so backwards when we’ve been working on new projects using the newer technologies. I’m actively looking forward to being able to migrate my work flow over to doing what I do now, but with being able to trace at the same time with hot reload and eventually get these aging projects up to snuff with the latest tech.

    • Sayed Ibrahim HashimiMicrosoft employee 0

      For asp.net .net framework Website projects, you can use Web Live Preview. The difference between your current workflow, and Web Live Preview, is that you don’t need to save the files for updates to be applied. I’m going to be publishing a post on this blog tomorrow with more details about Web Live Preview.

  • André Ziegler 0

    “Our first preview of Visual Studio 2022 included a new font that’s easier to read, Cascadia Code. In our second preview, we’re improving Visual Studio usability for everyone with updated icons that are clearer and easier to distinguish.”

    this is a lie. Font is blurry as hell and the icons make it much more difficult to see that they are for.

    • Stone Free 0

      Weird because on my PC it is massively bold, too bold for me. Will be going back to a ligerturised version of Consolas

  • Chuck Ryan 0

    Interesting… I could not see any of the comments on this post, or the latest one, until I logged in.

  • David Chavez 0

    Hello,

    What are the hardware requirements for VS2022 P2?

    Thanks!

    • Baltermia Clopath 0

      Are you planning to code on a potato?

  • Huo Yaoyuan 0

    Hello, I’m observing more hangs and lags while browsing System.Private.CoreLib after updating to preview 2. Please investigate potential performance issue.

    • Terry Smith 0

      Huh… Bugs in a preview build… Who saw that coming?

  • mathieu prevot 0

    c++ hot reload is HOT ! Will the c++ hot reload allow live unit testing (LUT) of native c++ code ? Could native LUT be considered (technically) ?

  • Rosdi Kasim 0

    As usual…, don’t rush to download guys… let others be the guinea pig… as a general rule, wait 1 year after the initial release for all the edges cases ironed out and all plugins to catch up…

  • Peter Nimmo 0

    We still have a branch that has to use Visual Studio 2015.

    Early in the Visual Studio 2019 preview timeline running the setup for VS2019 used to stop you launching a VS2015 instance until the installer was finished with VS2019. Then a bit later on that stopped happening and you could launch VS2015 whilst an update to VS2019 was being installed.

    This same problem is back with this VS2022 preview, again I’m locked out of VS2015 for the duration of the install (unless I am lucky enough to have an instance ready and waiting)

  • Jakub Míšek 0

    As the extension author for years, I can see neat improvements underneath, as well as the performance improvements. Good work.

    As always; our PHP Tools support has been updated and released for the new VS: https://blog.devsense.com/2021/visual-studio-2022-preview

  • Cliff Harker 0

    What is it with this obsession about icons! Nobody cares!

    Every since VS2008 when nice chiseled multi-colored icons were replaced with drab, hard to distinguish back and gray icons, the icons have been rubbish!

    This is what happens when “marketing” get involved in anything. Style over substance

  • Marvin Groß 0

    The new razor editor is still very laggy and crashes really often. I hope it will be better in later previews.

  • David Kruse 0

    PLEASE stop wasting time with icons.

    Add something users REALLY need, like DirectX support .NET (specially C#)….or even better a CUDA GPU wrapper for .NET.

    • Sinan ŞENBAŞ 0

      Microsoft stopped wasting time with icons..! Did you see windows 11. Start menu is dead..! You can only alignment center or left, right. This is impressive..!

  • Jay Winter 0

    I was unable to download the preview – getting 404 error.

  • Nathan Sokalski 0

    Are there any improvements or changes for the Xamarin capabilities or features?

  • Phillip Weidenhübler 0

    icons look to oversimplificated some are nice some are not

    some more ui freatures would be cool in an modern Developing Software.

    in addition to that i would make it look like Windows 11 clean and Modern

  • White Johnny 0

    Does Edit and Continue for C++ been improved? It’s been years now that I disabled it because it almost never worked. On an hello world project it worked, but on real world project (more includes, pch, etc.. ) with same compilation options EnC takes ages and then fail to apply changes 95% of the time. I will give it a try with VS 2022.

  • Mike-E 0

    What are the efforts being made with extension authors to onboard extensions? I have 30 extensions installed in 2019 and only 2 of them are listed as being available to 2022.

    Also, what is the deal with Power Commands?

    https://github.com/microsoft/VS-PPT

    Last commit in 2018? Srsly…

    • Mike-E 0

      FWIW my list of extensions as reported by Extension Manager 2019:

        "extensions": [
          {
            "name": "Align Assignments",
            "vsixId": "AlignAssignments.41858b2d-ff0b-4a43-80b0-f1b2d6084935"
          },
          {
            "name": "Azure Data Lake and Stream Analytics Tools",
            "vsixId": "1e906ff5-9da8-4091-a299-5c253c55fdc9"
          },
          {
            "name": "Cloud Explorer for VS 2019 Preview",
            "vsixId": "Microsoft.VisualStudio.CloudExplorer.16.0"
          },
          {
            "name": "Copy As Html",
            "vsixId": "CopyAsHtml.42374550-426a-400e-96f9-237682e8dea6"
          },
          {
            "name": "Double-Click Maximize",
            "vsixId": "DoubleClickMaximize.050825c2-33a4-4b7d-b3af-bd46bd99a265"
          },
          {
            "name": "Editor Guidelines",
            "vsixId": "Editor_Guidelines.Microsoft Corp..123716ef-b2ed-4fab-bbcf-1d5f84856ca3"
          },
          {
            "name": "Extension Manager 2019",
            "vsixId": "4a196712-2c3f-4730-ad1d-e7cda4185eb2"
          },
          {
            "name": "File Nesting",
            "vsixId": "6c799bc4-0d4c-4172-98bc-5d464b612dca"
          },
          {
            "name": "Fix Mixed Tabs",
            "vsixId": "FixMixedTabs.9f1d3050-b986-4b10-ae36-97c6efc5e968"
          },
          {
            "name": "GitHub Extension for Visual Studio",
            "vsixId": "c3d3dc68-c977-411f-b3e8-03b0dccf7dfc"
          },
          {
            "name": "Line Press",
            "vsixId": "13d97f3e-75e2-4715-a444-715b5f39f0a4"
          },
          {
            "name": "Live Share",
            "vsixId": "Microsoft.VisualStudio.LiveShare"
          },
          {
            "name": "MappingGenerator",
            "vsixId": "MappingGenerator"
          },
          {
            "name": "Markdown Editor",
            "vsixId": "9ca64947-e9ca-4543-bfb8-6cce9be19fd6"
          },
          {
            "name": "Match Margin",
            "vsixId": "MatchMargin.d85a25b5-f7b3-46a9-997e-a2d669dc2c93"
          },
          {
            "name": "Middle Click Scroll",
            "vsixId": "MiddleClickScroll.263a3239-a004-40e6-b790-4fd371832c85"
          },
          {
            "name": "ML.NET Model Builder (Preview)",
            "vsixId": "FE96D051-645F-4309-AE99-107A776B0DA2"
          },
          {
            "name": "Mouse Navigation",
            "vsixId": "Tvl.VisualStudio.MouseNavigation.74370A5B-33D9-4F9E-A910-D83D487A825D"
          },
          {
            "name": "Peek Help",
            "vsixId": "PeekHelp.51f43c96-8220-43bf-a922-390a361e7640"
          },
          {
            "name": "Power Commands for Visual Studio",
            "vsixId": "PowerCommands.3ecdd89b-f985-483d-8c94-be37de4dc083"
          },
          {
            "name": "PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio",
            "vsixId": "PowerShellTools.VS2017"
          },
          {
            "name": "Productivity Power Tools 2017/2019",
            "vsixId": "ProductivityPowerPack.0d5b9d71-e118-46de-a20c-555176e53900"
          },
          {
            "name": "Quick Launch Tasks",
            "vsixId": "QuickLaunchTasks"
          },
          {
            "name": "Shrink Empty Lines",
            "vsixId": "SyntacticLineCompression.4452fb8f-b348-49eb-9499-76669d3f9c75"
          },
          {
            "name": "Solution Error Visualizer",
            "vsixId": "SolutionErrorVisualizer.a392f96b-6b33-4b53-b4bb-3376a05f986c"
          },
          {
            "name": "SwitchStartupProject for VS 2019",
            "vsixId": "399c17d5-6a98-44e4-938e-6d0f1f804076"
          },
          {
            "name": "Time Stamp Margin",
            "vsixId": "TimeStampMargin.255e8b14-4a53-4eb7-89a7-7ab741c1f612"
          },
          {
            "name": "Trailing Whitespace Visualizer",
            "vsixId": "4c1a78e6-e7b8-4aa9-8812-4836e051ff6d"
          },
          {
            "name": "VSColorOutput",
            "vsixId": "CD56B219-38CB-482A-9B2D-7582DF4AAF1E"
          },
          {
            "name": "Web Live Preview (Preview)",
            "vsixId": "Microsoft.WebTools.BrowserLink.WebLivePreview"
          }
        ]
  • Jens Jährig 0

    Please offer an easy way to try it out, without installing it on our day-to-day production machine.

    I think of a ready-to-run:
    – Hyper-V-Image
    – a Windows Docker Image
    – or an Azure Machine (as you do already for release versions)

    Cheers Jens

  • Atle Smelvær 0

    This would be fine. But there is no way to test MAUI with this release. The maui-check gives me an error “× Missing Visual Studio >= 17.0.0-pre.3.0”

    How do I test Maui?

  • Joel Evans 0

    I just wanted to say I think the preview is awesome. The Icons look nice and the font is great. I have noticed some improvements on 2019 so I am looking forward to the full release, keep up the great work.

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