Visual Studio 2022 Preview 3 now available!

Mads Kristensen

We are excited to announce the third preview release of Visual Studio 2022! With Preview 3 there are more 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 Preview 3. We’d love for you to download it, try it out, and join us in shaping the next major release of Visual Studio with your feedback.

Personal & team productivity

In the Visual Studio 2022 vision blog we talked about delivering innovative features that revolutionize development is an important area for us to empower you to live your best developer life. In preview 3 we are adding new capabilities to some of the less used, but useful, features such as attach to process.

Attach to process improvements

One example is the improvements in the attach to process dialog. The dialog is now async, shows the command line arguments for processes, IIS information for w3wp.exe processes, and lasty the dialog has an optional tree view mode for showing parent-child process relationships. These capabilities reduce a lot of the friction in deciding which process to debug in advanced scenarios.

New project designer

With Preview 3 there’s a brand-new project properties designer for .NET SDK projects. The new designer is easier to use and browse with a single column of options with clear descriptions. Best of all the new designer has built in search so it’s now easy to find the property you need.

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Dark theme improvements

In preview 3 you’ll see big changes to the dark theme to improve the usability of Visual Studio. The new dark theme has a new accent color, which is less intense, and used more sparingly to reduce distraction and eyestrain. The new accent color now matches the latest product visual identity, which helps you quickly find the right window when they are navigating among multiple tools.

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Developing modern apps

With Visual Studio 2022, we are building tools to both support your existing applications and tools for building the latest types of applications. For example, in preview 3 we’re adding new capabilities to run tests in Linux environments and a new project types for frontend development with React and Vue.js applications using either TypeScript or JavaScript.

Remote testing

With remote testing you can now get feedback from your cross-platform tests, and even debug them from the comfort of Visual Studio! The feature works with a range of remote environments such as Linux containers, WSL, and over SSH connections – empowering you to test modern cross platform .NET applications.

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New JavaScript and TypeScript project types

The new JavaScript and TypeScript project types for Angular, Vue, and React make it easy to incorporate front end applications within your Visual Studio solution – empowering you to launch and debug your entire app from Visual Studio.

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Innovation at your fingertips

Another crucial part of our vision for Visual Studio 2022 is innovative capabilities that unlock your potential as a developer. As a developer some of the hardest issues to resolve are issues that only happen when your application is running live. To diagnose those issues sometimes all you have is a customer report that you can’t reproduce. If you can collect a memory dump of the issue, you can use Visual Studio to debug the memory dump, but that’s no easy task.

Diagnostic analyzer

Memory dumps are complex and finding the root cause of an issue is like looking for a needle in a haystack. With Visual Studio 2022 Preview 3 we’ve made that process a breeze – with the diagnostic analyzer. The diagnostic analyzer can be used on memory dumps to identify common problems seen in .NET applications. Empowering you to root cause complex issues in no time.

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Working with multiple Git repositories at once

Preview 3 is also getting new preview features such as multiple Git repository which enables you to work with a single solution that has projects in multiple repositories and contribute to them from a single instance of Visual Studio. This feature can be enabled from the `Preview` tab of Tools -> Options menu, just search for “preview” in the search bar (Ctrl+Q) and look for “Enable multi-repo support”.

One click publishing to Azure DevOps

In Preview 3 makes it easier to publish your code to Azure DevOps with the updated create Git repository experience. With a single click Visual Studio initializes a new Git repository and pushes it to Azure DevOps.

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Summary

The features above are just a few examples of the direction we’re going with Visual Studio 2022. There are a lot more features to be explored in Preview 3. Over the next few weeks, you’ll see more blog posts coming for many of the new capabilities of Visual Studio 2022. If you can’t wait, head on over to the release notes to learn more about what’s new in preview 3.

Take part!

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 3 can be installed side-by-side with Visual Studio 2019 and it’s free for anyone to use while in preview. We want your help making Visual Studio 2022 the best developer experience for you, and we are excited for you to try out all the new productivity enhancements. We encourage you to download and use the preview just like you would use Visual Studio 2019 preview. We appreciate your time in providing feedback via Developer Community, reporting a problem, and taking part in surveys.

70 comments

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    • Renee GA 0

      same here

    • Michael Taylor 0

      Same here. Reported in feedback tool. Whether you try to update to Preview 3 or repair after it fails to install it will always fail on this package.

      Once you start the update your instance is now corrupted. Even though it appears to fail during the download it has already installed part of the update making the entire instance broken.

    • PandaSharp 0

      Same here

    • Gabe Wells 0

      Same problem here.

      Reported in feedback tool as well.

    • Gene Higgins 0

      Same here.

    • Chris Henry 0

      I am getting the same exception.

    • anonymous 0

      this comment has been deleted.

    • Andy SterlandMicrosoft employee 0

      Thank you for trying out the preview and reporting this issue! It looks like we have an issue with propagating some of the updated packages to our CDN. We’ve decided to pause the roll out of Preview 3 as we investigate the issue.

      • Douglas Husemann 0

        very popular feel sorry if there isn’t an autoscript for 72000+ reports of the issue.

      • Sam Smith 0

        seems to be working now. Note that with this – Visual Studio 2022 was stuck in mid installation and unusable – even if I cancelled the installation. You should look at this and rolling back.

        • Mike Dean 0

          It really isn’t. If you run the download it tries to install 2.1 then decides everything is up to date. If you uninstall 2.1 and try downloading Preview 3 what you get is Preview 2.1 again.

          • Andy SterlandMicrosoft employee 0

            The issue is fixed now and you should be able to update to Preview 3.

  • Joe Chang 0

    it doesn’t hurt to periodically strip a system down to minimum and reinstall everything, I would do a complete OS reinstall, but I lost my MS Office keys. Ok, on following the Prev 3 links to install, it says 2.1 , same as before install?

    • Mikko Kunnari 0

      Same here. 2.1 is the latest version available in the VS Installer.

      • Mike Dean 0

        Same

  • Mike-E 0

    Any word on plans to push extensions for 2022? I recall for 2019 there was a push to get extensions moved over from 2017 with developers. I am glad to see Mads move all of his already but his only account for 2 of mine, including the nifty Extension Manager, which I wish auto-converted extensions from 2019->2022. 🙂

    What about PowerCommands? They haven’t touched their code since 2018. :/

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

    • Michael Goldshteyn 0

      +100… This!!

    • Leslie RichardsonMicrosoft employee 0

      Thanks for the feedback. We have notified most extension authors with guidance and support on how to migrate their extensions to VS 2022, so it’s really down to each author’s individual timeline and resources as to when specific extensions will be published. PPT’s migration is currently in progress so you should see that suite of tools available soon!

      • Mike-E 0

        Thank you for letting me know, Leslie! It is very much appreciated.

        After some further investigation, VS-PPT is even worse than I thought. Power Commands is actually no longer a part of it and there doesn’t appear to be a GitHub for it? I hope that is being upgraded for the ride, too.

        In any case, I have made a vote here for others to upvote just in case. 😉
        https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Upgrade-Popular-MSFT-Extensions-to-VS202/1500844

      • Jrdiver 0

        It would be nice to get the Microsoft extensions updated as well, I use the installer projects extension quite a bit and between that and resharper (but that’s on jetbeans) being the 2 bigger hold ups on transition more fully, while mostly been using 22 for Maui experimentation

  • Mon Minh 0

    my visual studio installer doesn’t show the update button.
    it always say it up-todate(v 2.1).

    • Joris Kommeren 0

      Looks like it got pulled, but the link in the header unfortunately seems to point to a ticket that was closed with a fix being a different version (16.11) instead of 2022 preview 3.

      Heck I wouldn’t mind if Preview 3 was republished in its broken state as apparently a modify in the installer would have fixed it

      • Mike Dean 0

        I think it’s fixed – I have Preview 3 downloading and installing at the moment

    • Andy SterlandMicrosoft employee 0

      The issue is fixed now and you should be able to update to Preview 3.

      • Nigel Booth 0

        I updated to preview 3 earlier and then had problems with VS2019 too. I was using a Windows 11 insider preview and thought maybe it was due to this so I have today gone back to windows 10 and then downloaded the VS2019 installer (16.11) which has failed and the VS2022 preview 3 installer which fails on VC_runtimeMinimum_x86.msi – this is a cached file that is inaccessible. Luckily I have both versions on another laptop and that is still working ok. I shall avoid any updates for now on there.

  • jtsombakos 0

    According to the Developer Community article (https://aka.ms/vs/2022/pre/p3devcom) this should be available now. Except the Visual Studio Installer is showing I am up to date at 17.0.0 Preview 2.1.

  • Gabe Wells 0

    I have updated to Preview 3 but when I open VS it hangs in a ‘Not Responding’ state.
    Will try to submit feedback via the Visual Studio Installer tool.

    • Andy SterlandMicrosoft employee 0

      Thank you for submitting feedback through developer community!

  • Luis Linares 0

    Hello! i have installed the new release and everything looks good! The installation was successfull!

    Now, I’m trying to install MAUI with this new version but i got an error 🙁

    I Ran maui-check and i got everything OK, but when i try to install maui, i recieve the message:


    Installing pack Microsoft.Maui.Controls.Runtime.win version 6.0.100-preview.7.1345…
    Writing workload pack installation record for Microsoft.Maui.Controls.Runtime.win version 6.0.100-preview.7.1345…
    Installing pack Microsoft.Maui.Essentials.Ref.win version 6.0.100-preview.7.1345…
    Writing workload pack installation record for Microsoft.Maui.Essentials.Ref.win version 6.0.100-preview.7.1345…
    Installing pack Microsoft.Maui.Essentials.Runtime.win version 6.0.100-preview.7.1345…
    Writing workload pack installation record for Microsoft.Maui.Essentials.Runtime.win version 6.0.100-preview.7.1345…
    Garbage collecting for SDK feature bands 6.0.100…
    Workload installation failed: The JSON value could not be converted to Microsoft.NET.Sdk.WorkloadManifestReader.WorkloadPackId. Path: $.Id | LineNumber: 0 | BytePositionInLine: 40.

    • Damian Wyka 0

      Same here. First i had issue with single project extension for over 2 weeks on preview 6 preview (500 error) had to wait for whole next preview now maui workload installer is broken and still cant test maui ;/

      • MarcMicrosoft employee 0

        Can you both try renaming (or delete) your dotnet\metadata folder and trying the install again? We think there is an incompatibility with an older workload that was installed from a prior version of maui check that we’re not handling correctly. Note that any errors after the “Garbage collecting” message are likely not errors in the install of the workload but rather are errors in cleaning up prior workloads that were installed.

        I’ll try to get our release notes updated for this if you can confirm that solution works for you.

        • Aaron High 0

          That solution worked for me. I also needed to update maui-check. For reference, I deleted my metadata folder at ../Program Files/dotnet/metadata (since there are a few dotnet folders).

  • Michael M. 0

    PLEASE for the love of god. Make it possible to go to the old black theme. I pretty much hate the new one. It looks awful imo. 🙁
    I get change is good but seriously? changing a theme and then not saving the old one as a profile so people can use it if they dislike it?

    • Cherry WangMicrosoft employee 0

      Hello! Thanks for your feedback! The old dark theme is now available for download in the Visual Studio Marketplace.

      • Michael M. 0

        Thank you guys very much.
        Sorry for the harsh tone. Have a good one.

        • Ray 0

          Don’t worry, you’re not alone. The stinky contrasts between background colors and (useless) outlines are just eye blinding. The colors are randomly smeared here and there. I would accept this as a good High Contrast theme, if at all. The new theme is dark in the sense of it being horrible.

          • Michael M. 0

            For me the icons on the right side
            Image
            were completely black until I hovered on them (I’m not using the “new” icons because they are not my cup of tea either)
            So maybe this was also overlooked? or just a me problem.

            //edit
            just remembered this now after using the old theme again.

  • 王宏亮 0

    When using vs2022 preview 3 with .net 6 preview 7, vs stuck everywhere.

    (devenv.exe, PID 1544, Thread 1) UIContextHelper.SetUIContext: The call to IVsAggregatableProject.GetCmdUIContextCookie failed. Error code: 1

    • Andy SterlandMicrosoft employee 0

      Thanks for trying out Preview 3! Could you file a Developer Community ticket. Thanks!

  • Juan Carlos Chávez 0

    Everything is amazing except the new Dark Theme 🙁

    • Jérôme Lapostolle 0

      that’s my take exactly. i feel it’s somewhat cheap and flat.

      • Cherry WangMicrosoft employee 0

        Hello! Thanks for your feedback! We’re open to feedback and bug reports as we continue to improve the new dark theme. If you find issues that are impacting your productivity negatively, please feel free to elaborate a bit more to help us troubleshoot. You can also report a problem from Visual Studio 2022 and include screenshots. The old dark theme is also available for download in the Visual Studio Marketplace in case you want to go back.

    • Tanvir Ahmad Arjel 0

      Same here! New dark theme is inconsistent in design and color. I have disabled this from Preview Feature menu.

  • Jose Felix 0

    Fails to install preview 3, the installer stops saying it cannot install the package
    Package ‘Microsoft.WebView2.arm64,version=92.0.902.55’ failed to install.
    Search URL
    https://aka.ms/VSSetupErrorReports?q=PackageId=Microsoft.WebView2.arm64;PackageAction=Install;ReturnCode=-2147219199
    Details
    Command executed: “C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\VisualStudio\Packages\Microsoft.WebView2.arm64,version=92.0.902.55\microsoftedgewebview2runtimeinstallerarm64.exe” /silent /install
    Return code: -2147219199
    Return code details: Unknown error (0x80040901)

  • Zehev Spitz 0

    While I am deeply appreciative of the efforts put into VS 2022, particularly multi-repo support, is there any hope for improvement of the debugging visualizer development story? Specifically:

    * Debugging visualizers associated with value types appear to hang or crash
    * There’s no way to read the source of the expression being visualized, which would enable generating a expression that could be pasted into the Watch or Immediate panes. (Admittedly, the ideal solution would be to add the watch directly, but I suspect that’s far beyond the visualizer security model.)
    * Other information about the current debugging environment — source code language and language version, source file path and line number, current assembly path — would also be useful.
    * The default deployment story for debugging visualizers requires end-users to download and XCOPY files into one of two folders. Since the debuggee component of a visualizer may target up to three different sets of target frameworks, that’s up to three additional DLLs that have to be pasted into the appropriate subfolders. (link)
    * There is no update notification built-in to Visual Studio, as there are for extensions. Update notifications thus require a custom mechanism built into the visualizer.
    * Dependent assembly resolution is limited to the assemblies in the same folder as the visualizer component.
    * Some sort of theme information from VS, allowing the visualizer to better match the VS theme.

  • Serhii Nedilia 0

    Visual Studio 2022 all the time resets in Unity External Script Editor and not everything colored, like much of fields, which was blue before

    • John MillerMicrosoft employee 0

      Sorry for the issues! I’d like to help get this fixed. Would you help me by using the Help > Submit Feedback > Report a Problem menu in Visual Studio? From there, you can report an issue and include a screenshot and other details like the version of Unity being used.

      Another quick thing to check is that your Unity project has the Visual Studio Editor package 2.0.11 or newer installed. This is required for Visual Studio 2022 to work with Unity. You can check which version is installed using Unity Editor > Windows > Package Manager.

    • christian brandoni 0

      Any improvement compared to 2019 for Unity development? Faster debug start or something else?

  • Serge Lussier 0

    Since Preview 3: as soon as in, every c++ intellisense openned files lose the syntax coloring.
    Back to vs16
    Thanks. See you at the release day. 🙂

  • Игорь Баклыков 0

    Preview 3.0 is good, but WHERE IS CMAKE 3.20 AT LEAST to support VS 2022 generation?!?!?!

  • Patrick Lanz 0

    Hello,
    There is a bug in column selection with this preview:
    Make a column selection and then move the cursor with the keyboard: the column selection remains and is moved!
    I made plenty of errors while writing code because of this.

  • David Ferretti 0

    With WSL (Remote) Running, Debugging, and now Testing part of VS, is it a potential future that VS will have remote backends similar to VS Code?

    If I am working on a project that has a web API and a SPA frontend for example, I would like to clone the repo into my WSL2 drive and use an angular VS Code devcontainer to take advantage of the faster file system performance. That works well for the frontend project, but then I am unable to realistically run the backend project in full VS. I can technically open the .sln from my \\wsl$ drive but it is essentially a network mapped drive so VS is not really able to run the solution well.

    I usually end up cloning the repo twice, into my WSL2 drive for frontend work and my Windows drive for backend work, but it would be awesome if I could stay totally in WSL2 land with VS Code and VS.

  • Joel Evans 0

    I had no issues with downloading the upgrade. I like the Dark Theme changes and I look forward to using the project designer to set up my linux projects!

  • Michael Tranchida 0

    I can not get it to install, even with no workloads. Tried removing preview 2, the installer, started fresh, still no luck

  • Josh Baker 0

    I tried downloading the 2022 preview. I’ve been having installation failures for the WebView2 package; I got it to try the .NET MAUI update and get a headstart. So far the experience has been aweful. I can’t even get a working installation due to the package failure. Does this require a specific version of windows; pre-post update?

  • Mugur Vlad 0

    I just updated from Preview 2 to Preview 3.1 and it seems IntelliSense/Syntax Highlighting stopped working for my CMake C++ projects. Tried reinstalling to no effect. Any idea what to do?

  • Shmuel Tannenbaum 0

    I just upgraded from update 2.1 to 3.1 and for some reason my sqlproj project is no longer loading. I also don’t see the sql server database project template in the add new project dialog. Did MS discontinue sqlproj project type?

    • Shmuel Tannenbaum 0

      my bad, there were some installation errors that I didn’t notice, I ran the installer repair and prob is fixed!!

  • piercarlo schiavo 0

    Hello,
    I installed the 17 3.1 of Visual Studio Preview, no problem with it.

    I’m working on a Blazor Hosted WebAssembly and the problem is with Intellisense, on razor components.

    With Visual Studio 2019 (latest preview version) the intellisense take almost one second to show suggestion, but with 2022 it take 10/20 some time more seconds and some time freeze.

    So with it I need to work manual.

    Some suggestion ?

  • Tsahi 0

    I’m curious how far will Microsoft go with maintaining two IDEs, Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Is there a plan, at some point in the future, to throw Visual Studio away?

    • Krystof Zacek 0

      VS and VS Code are two completely different things. Visual Studio is far more capable and is intended for serious work while VS Code is rather a multipurpose lightweight toy.

      • Антон Бреусов 0

        I kinda disagree that VS Code is a lightweight toy – it’s a very powerful thing but indeed VS & VSCode use completely different approaches to working with them.

        In VS it’s focused on the concept of projects & solutions. And then it contains all the info about building it, linking dependencies, etc. But, the file tree view is rather limited to the things that are included in projects.

        On the other hand, in VS Code you’re focusing on opening some root directory, which can contain some project information, or not. It’s up to you to decide how to set it up to work as IDE, or simply files Editor.

    • Антон Бреусов 0

      Please, don’t push such discussions.

      VS & VS Code are completely different ideologically. And while VS Code is very powerful & flexible, it allows a lot more manual work to set up it for building, debugging & other things. It also requires keeping eye on the extensions zoo, so they will not kill each other!

  • Syun Segawa 0

    Any Chance for Windows11 design style on Visual Studio ? At least Round Corner.

  • Gisle Vanem 0

    It does not include a new version of ‘cl.exe’ AFAICS.
    So are we supposed to install over the current location?
    (In my case f:\gv\vc_2019).

  • Ethan Miller 0

    Awesome, I love the new 2022 edition.

  • Carsten Feltman 0

    Hi

    First a general comment on MS, .NET and the whole universe surrounding it: Kudos for really delivering in my opinion. All the pieces of the puzzle still needs a little work on the edges, but as a whole I think you’re on a path to a development eco-system that I am happy to be working in, and really look forward to work in the next phase of (NET 6, VS 2022 and what follows)!

    It’s also great to see just how succesful VS Code is – you know that when you can turn a VIM-user, you have done something extraordinary 🙂

    I don’t think there’s any doubt as to some of the reasons for it’s succes, which is of course it’s responsivenes – which we all hope to see VS 2022 try and match, especially now that we’re finally 64 bit and with some real improvements on the memory management. I myself already feel like it’s more responsive working in 2022, but that can also be so many other things (like not having 150 extensions loaded, yet). And speaking of extensions, I think many would agree that the smooth and seamless extensibility of the system is another big part of its succes. I think most developers would a agree, that they love extensions – just try and couny how many articles on Medium that are listings of favourite extension.

    And from that we come to my big wish: A total overhaul of the extensions eco-system! How I would love to have a real EXTENSION MANAGER, that – aided by some AI – knew what kind of extensions I could use, based on the type of project, the way I code, the patterns used in my code, and the vast data-source of what other developers use via GitHub. And that these extensions had their own dimension/eco-system, so that whether I am on my Mac using VS Code, PC using VS 2019 or online using GitHub/VS Online/Whatever – it would always try to align my development environment to the degree that I have asked for it to do.

    And seeing that I am speaking Mads, I am sure I that I am being listened too. Mads, you are the reason I have started to do prototypes of extensions myself and I am sure you agree that extensions needs a much more prominent space in Visual Studio. It is already an important part of VS, but I think that it will become a much more important part and that it needs a much better environment for both development, quality control and management in general. This is so that there will be not only be more extensions, but more _quality_ extensions and a way for the developers to find these quality extensions. We need a proper tool, as I do not think the current environment offers that – and it is a shame with all that great functionality that is there to assist developers, if they only knew it was there and how it could make their workday so much easier and/or fun?!

    So,hHow about that EXTENSION MANAGER again; One that doesn’t just show you a list of extension and a 5 line blob about it. And I do not mind repeating myself here: it should know what I might want to use, where and why. And as I also said before, it could (and should) be aided by AI and a lot of data, but very importantly: also aided by the community with a easy-to-use feedback system, that ensures lots of reviews and feedback to >1> Help the developers find and choose useful extensions, and >2> Help the (extension) developers improve, extend and maintain their extensions so that we can use them even more 🙂

    Best regards,
    Feltman

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