Visual Studio 2022 17.4 for Windows x64, Mac, and Arm64 is now available, .NET 7 in tow too

Visual Studio is the integrated development environment (IDE) of choice for many developers due to its rich suite of capabilities and multi-platform support. Microsoft regularly rolls out new releases of the tool, introducing new features and improvements. Today, Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2022 17.4, which is a pretty major update. Along with the regular 64-bit Windows (x64) and Mac enhancements, this is also the first version of the IDE to support Arm64 architectures natively.

A Wizard of Oz meme with Dorothy Scarecrow and Tinman standing scared with the subtitles saying x64

Visual Studio 2022 17.4 brings support for .NET 7 as well. In terms of improvements over its predecessor, .NET 7 offers better performance, enhancements to .NET MAUI, built-in container support for the .NET SDK, Microsoft Orleans 7.0, and observability integrations, along with updates to C# 11 and F# 7 to make them more developer-friendly.

The other interesting aspect of this release is native support for Arm64. This should go well with Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023 (also known as Project Volterra). The Redmond tech giant has emphasized that it is building a complete toolchain for Arm-native development, making this just a stepping stone in the process. Along with vastly improved performance, the Arm64 version of Visual Studio 2022 17.4 offers the following workloads in general availability:

.NET desktop development
NET and web development
Desktop development with C++
Universal Windows Platform development
Visual Studio extension development
Game development with C++
JS development

That said, it is important to understand that Windows 11 is the minimum OS required to get the Arm64 version of the IDE. It is offered via a single Visual Studio installer (available here). Side-by-side installations of x64/x86 and Arm64 Visual Studio are not supported, so you will need to ensure that you remove any previous installations before you download the new one.

Meanwhile, the Mac update contains UI upgrades, as well as enhancements to the editor and the debugger, among many other things.

Of course, all of this is just the tip of the iceberg, so if you're interested in more granular details about each release, check out Microsoft's dedicated blog posts listed below:

Furthermore, Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview is also available for download. In terms of enterprise support, Visual Studio 2022 17.4 is available for long term servicing channel (LTSC) customers and will continue to be supported until July 11, 2024.