Microsoft has announced new features for Visual Studio 2022 in their fourth preview release, and there are some quite interesting new features that are coming our the way! As we all know, Microsoft is really good at receiving feedback about the previous versions of Visual Studio and there is a huge list of improvements that have been made throughout the development of Visual Studio 2022.
In this article I want to mention some of the highlighted features of the upcoming Visual Studio 2022.
3x faster search results
As we all know, sometimes if a project has hundreds or even thousands of files, it is really difficult to find what you are actually looking for, so developers tend to separate one big project into smaller projects to make it more manageable.
To overcome this issue in Preview 4, Microsoft announced that the find in files searching tool is now 3x faster than before. One of the examples shown, was a c# solution with hundreds of files, where the search time for a specific text in all files across the solution has been decreased from over 17 seconds down to 6.9 seconds.
Another great thing that has been worked on in Visual Studio, is to increase the scalability and improvements in performance of the overall processing. The new Visual Studio is designed to work on 64bit instead of a 32bit application which gives significant performance improvements in scalability.
Dependent breakpoints
As we all know, from a developer point of view one of the most used features of Visual Studio is debugging. We use breakpoints to stop the execution of the code, and understand the values of the variables and the state of the code at a given time. Depending on the complexity of the code, sometimes a developer uses lots of breakpoints during a debugging session. And sometimes it feels that some of thosebreakpoints are redundant, or at least some of the breakpoints need a condition to be valid.
In Preview 4, Microsoft has addressed this issue and announced a new feature called dependent breakpoints. Dependent breakpoints are the breakpoints which are valid through a debugging session,only if another breakpoint is hit during that debugging session. This is really time efficient if you don’t need to stop at a specific line if a condition has not been set.
Creating a dependent breakpoint is also simple. Just right click on the breakpoint and choose “only enable when the following breakpoint is hit” option, and from the dropdown menu select the breakpoint that you want to be hit first.
Developing modern apps
We all know that traditional way of coding: We write the code, we compile it and then we run the code or refresh the web application to see the results. Hot Reload is a relatively new feature that has been introduced in Visual Studio 2019, which enables the developer to see the changes without hassle by just hot reloading.
In Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4, Microsoft announced big updates to the Razor and Blazor editors, for which a large number of issues were reported by the community in Preview 3. These issues have been fixed, and some new capabilities for hot reload in ASP.NET Core were added.
One of the coolest updates is that Hot Reload has a new feature including CSS files, where the developer doesn’t necessarily need to save the css file to see the reflected changes. If the coding is syntactically correct then the changes will be shown immediately while you are still coding. Cool!
As mentioned before, besides these highlighted features there are lots of new fixes and development that has been introduced in Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4. Microsoft encourages all the developers to install the new version of Visual Studio 2022 and use the new features to give them feedback about the application. The latest version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 can be downloaded from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/preview/
If you want more reading about the subject there are reference links below,
- DevBlog: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-2022-preview-4-is-now-available/?ocid=aid3021690
- Microsoft Youtube Video about the new features: https://youtu.be/qme1vmJEQJc
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 Release Notes: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022/release-notes-preview
I hope you enjoyed it!
Senior Software Developer
mirac.kocaturk@sirocco.se
+46 70 988 44 39
