Visual Studio 2022 Preview 3 now available!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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