Visual Studio 2022 became generally available back in November 2021, and Microsoft obviously intends to add more features to it past its initial release as well. Today, some of these have arrived in the form of Visual Studio 2022 17.1 Preview 2 and there are tons of enhancements to know about if you're a developer eager to test out the latest features in Microsoft's integrated development environment (IDE).
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With the latest preview release, it is easier to compare the current Git branch with other branches in a side-by-side view. There is support for enhanced detached head where you can checkout a commit and navigate to an older point in your repository and run it as well. Pull requests and team updates can now be reviewed relatively quicker too. Multi-repository support is also being enhanced and the IDE is now flexible to lightweight branch management operations. In the same vein, new branches can be automatically created across all active repos, you don't need to manually create them for each one. Finally, Line-staging is now in preview and it enables developers to stage chunks of their code.
In terms of code management, code cleanups on explicit save operations can now be automated using custom cleanup profiles. Yet another capability being introduced in this domain is enabling Visual Studio to automatically save code when the window loses focus. These automatic save points will not trigger automatic code cleanups. That said, Microsoft has emphasized that this feature is still in preview and the company is welcoming feedback on the topic.
Coming over to .NET productivity enhancements, you can place your cursor on a target symbol and then press F12 to quickly navigate to the source file. There is also a new Stack Trace Explorer window that you can use to navigate to the related code. Naming Styles have been edited to the EditorConfig UI too. These enable the enforcement of naming conventions for your team which is cloning the repository.
Embedded developers using C++ in Visual Studio will be pleased to know that there are now more supported views that enable interaction with real-time operating system objects (RTOS) and peripheral registers on microcontrollers. Find All reference searches in C++ projects are now up to 22% faster too.
For those using Visual Studio for macOS development, Microsoft is making it easier to do core debugging with LLDB and the IDE will automatically target macOS as the default configuration during the CMake experience as well.
Finally, color tabs are now supported. Visual Studio 2022 already applies a default color scheme to tabs but users now have the option to select their own colors to differentiate between different projects and file extensions.
Visual Studio 2022 17.1 Preview 2 is now live and you can download it from here.
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