Microsoft announced Visual Studio 2022 back in April, and since then, the company has released multiple previews of the software for both Windows and Mac. Now, it has revealed that it will be officially launching Visual Studio 2022 on November 8, 2021.
While Visual Studio 2022 hits general availability (GA) on November 8, Microsoft is also releasing a Release Candidate (RC) build today. The RC version comes with a go-live license for production use which entails that it"s a stable build that will be converted to the GA version after November 8, so you can use it to build production-ready apps right now. You can download it from here.
Additionally, Microsoft is also releasing Visual Studio 2022 Preview 5, which is what you want to use if you want to stay on the bleeding edge. On November 8, this build will upgrade to Visual Studio 2022 17.1 Preview 1. You can download Preview 5 from here and utilize your Enterprise or Professional license, the Community Edition, or enroll in free trials.
Visual Studio 2022"s launch event will take place virtually on November 8, 2021 at 8:30 AM PT. As we already know, the IDE comes in a 64-bit flavor, supports .NET 6 and C++ 20, offers better performance for the core debugger, and supports text chat during Live Share sessions. It offers more capabilities for the IntelliCode engine, improvements to code search, and better asynchronous collaboration, with new logic related to making commits and reviewing pull requests from platforms like GitHub. On Mac, it also features a refreshed UI that takes advantage of the native macOS UI elements.