Visual Studio 2022 17.4 began rolling out a couple of weeks ago. It is a significant release because it packs .NET 7 and natively supports not only Windows x64 and Mac architectures, but also Arm64. It features numerous other features such as rollback and multi-repository integration too. Now, Microsoft has detailed all the main performance improvements in the latest version of its popular integrated development environment (IDE).
For starters, Find and Replace in Files is now a whopping 3-4 times faster compared to version 17.3. Microsoft says that it has accomplished this through incremental improvements such as Async save and maximization of caching and indexing. The 95th percentile of Microsoft"s test data has replace operations pegged at 25 seconds on Visual Studio 2022 17.3 compared to 8 seconds in version 17.4.
Moreover, indexing is now faster for C++ projects too. You will notice a 25-30% performance gain when populating the source code index in large C++ projects.
Similarly, the need for solution reloads on branch switching has been reduced by 80%. And compared to Visual Studio 2019 which took 16 seconds for branch switching on the 95th percentile, Visual Studio 2022 17.4 takes around 10 seconds.
Meanwhile, the performance gains for .NET configuration switch responsiveness are tabulated below:
| Improvements | 17.3 (seconds) | 17.4 (seconds) | Gain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inheritance Margin | 51.1 | 26.6 | 47.90% |
| Errors | 60.3 | 27.8 | 53.90% |
| CodeLens | 128.3 | 38.2 | 70.20% |
| Background tasks | 219.2 | 89.9 | 58.90% |
Coming over to unit tests, Test Explorer should surface tests across projects much faster. In Microsoft"s testing, performance was double compared to the previous release when testing on a solution with 150 projects and 300,000 tests. Similarly, test assemblies ran three times faster and test runner process connections were established faster too.
Finally, most Save operations have been moved to a background thread so that the IDE stays responsive and is not impacted by the saving process. Microsoft says that this improvement will be most noticeable on slow hard drives, large projects, and network shares. If you have any feedback for Microsoft, you can let the company know via a survey or through this portal.