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November 21st, 2023

Visual Studio 2022 v17.8 Brings Increased Productivity, Further Unreal Engine Integration, and Cross-Platform Enhancements to C++

Sinem Akinci

Product Manager II

Introducing the latest updates to Visual Studio 2022, designed to make your development experience more productive and efficient than ever before. Our Visual Studio 2022 17.8 release includes powerful C++ productivity features that empowers you to check the size and alignment of classes, make member functions const, and make global functions static. We have also added features that will help you clean up and sort #include for improved code organization. For Unreal Engine developers, you’ll appreciate the new Unreal Engine Test Adapter, Unreal Engine snippets, macro specifier suggestions, and view in-memory bitmaps.

But that’s not all – we’ve also made cross-platform development easier to access and edit remote files with the Remote File Explorer, and added support for running CTest and GTest tests on your remote Linux machines from Visual Studio’s Test Explorer. Plus, we’ve made navigating your CMake targets easier than ever with improved customization and a simplified view.

To learn more about all of the latest for C++ in Visual Studio version 17.8, please read our announcement blog post.

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These 17.8 updates wouldn’t be possible without your ongoing support and feedback and we are really excited to deliver on some of our most top-voted suggestion tickets from the Visual Studio community, like support for running remote Linux unit tests in CMake (81 votes) and code cleanup support (41 votes). Other tickets we addressed include improving the CMake Targets View, and showing the size and alignment of classes and structs.

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Author

Sinem Akinci

Product Manager II

C++ Product Manager working on Copilot, CMake, and Linux experiences in Visual Studio and VS Code

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Jan Krause November 24, 2023 0

Thanks for the update. Some of the features like the improved CMake targets view and remote editing are really helpful. With other features it is not clear if they only work with certain types of projects. I wanted to try out the remote unit testing for C++. In a CMake project (open folder with presets) I can still only run the tests locally. If I switch to a remote Linux target (ssh) for building the...
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Thanks for the update. Some of the features like the improved CMake targets view and remote editing are really helpful. With other features it is not clear if they only work with certain types of projects. I wanted to try out the remote unit testing for C++. In a CMake project (open folder with presets) I can still only run the tests locally. If I switch to a remote Linux target (ssh) for building the test explorer is always empty. The ticket from the developer community also has no instructions.
The document here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/test/remote-testing?view=vs-2022 still says that Currently, the feature supports .NET tests only.
Other basic things are also missing from CMake projects (open folder). There is still no built-in functionality to comment out (Ctrl+K Ctrl+C) lines in CMake files. And there is also no code lens to run google tests. There was an old announcement https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-codelens-for-c-unit-testing/
It just talks about C++ developers in Visual Studio in general. It does not mention which project types are supported.

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- Sinem Akinci Author November 27, 2023 0
  
  Thank you so much for your feedback. I'll take your requests to our team for CMake open folder and other support.
  Regarding the remote Linux target issue, this is a known bug we have recently discovered. The workaround is to close VS, delete the ~/.vs folder on the remote machine and delete the .vs and out folder in the local project folder, then reopen the project in VS and generate and build. If this doesn't...
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  Thank you so much for your feedback. I’ll take your requests to our team for CMake open folder and other support.
  Regarding the remote Linux target issue, this is a known bug we have recently discovered. The workaround is to close VS, delete the ~/.vs folder on the remote machine and delete the .vs and out folder in the local project folder, then reopen the project in VS and generate and build. If this doesn’t resolve your issue, please open a developer community ticket here and send it to us so we can investigate. We are currently trying to resolve the bug in tandem.
  
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Eugene Ivanoff November 24, 2023 0

Triple quotes STILL do not work in Razor Editor…
Andreas Saurwein November 22, 2023 2

Definitely the worst update in a long time, full with issues, already downgraded to the 17.7 version again. Either the installer is failing and not updating some components or they are really botched. Hope its the installer and it gets fixed asap.
- Yevgeniy Fliegel November 23, 2023 0
  
  The update might be great, but I cannot test it because it does not work properly. My editor only shows me the first line of any file, which makes this new version completely unusable for me.