Microsoft today announced two major releases: .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022. Both releases have been long-awaited and are the result of over a year of development effort.
.NET 6 is a Long-term Support release, which means it will be supported for three years. Microsoft is recommending developers start to migrate their apps to this new version, and believes that the upgrade process is fairly simple from both .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5.
This release marks the first time that .NET will be supported on macOS Apple Silicon. It will also be supported on Windows Arm64.
New features in .NET 6 include:
- Hot Reload, which allows code changes to be viewed without needing to restart the app
- OpenTelemetry and dotnet monitor support
- Improvements to Visual Basic in the Visual Studio experience and Windows Form project experience
- The ability to render Blazor components from JavaScript
- WebAssembly AOT compilation for Blazor WebAssembly apps
- HTTP/3 support
- Support for symbolic links in File IO
- Support for OpenSSL, the ChaCha20Poly1305 encryption scheme, and runtime defense-in-depth mitigations
- Source generators and analyzers
According to Microsoft, the two main themes of Visual Studio 2022 are developer productivity and quality-of-life improvements.
It includes IntelliCode, which is an AI-assisted tool that can complete whole lines of code and spot repeated edits, and suggest similar fixes throughout the codebase.
Visual Studio 2022 also includes Hot Reload, Web Live Preview, and cross-platform testing on Linux.
Productivity in the edit and debug cycle
In this release, we focused on super-charging the edit and debug cycle.
Visual Studio 2022 has IntelliCode. It’s an AI-assisted code companion that enables you to type less and code more. What this means is IntelliCode can now complete whole lines of code for you, allowing you to write dependable code in just two taps of the tab key. IntelliCode can also spot repeated edits and suggest fixes throughout your codebase where there are similar patterns.
Once you’ve made those changes and have your app running, Hot Reload for .NET and C++ gives you the opportunity to update your code and see changes immediately. What’s more, you won’t need to redeploy and launch your application. And there are hundreds of other things under the hood that will help you. Some of the others include improvements in the debugger and .NET language service as well as new features, like Web Live Preview and cross-platform testing on Linux.
Visual Studio 2022 is the IDE for you. It’s for every developer, from apps built with Windows Forms and Win32, to Blazor, to cloud-native applications based on containers, to applications that use machine learning.
Scalability, reliability, and performance
Visual Studio 2022 is the first 64-bit release of Visual Studio. It can now take full advantage of modern hardware in order to reliably scale to larger, more complex projects. In addition, we’ve focused on improving the performance of common scenarios that you use every day.