I’m excited to share today we released Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 2! Your feedback goes directly to the product team working to deliver you the best developer IDE. We welcome your feedback on Developer Community where we are always eager to hear your suggestions for new or existing features and learn about any bugs or issues via report a problem.
This release is packed with new capabilities across the IDE, .NET, C++ and Setup. There is something in this release for everyone. Many of these tackle top asks you’ve voted for on Developer Community. Use the list below to jump straight to what matters most for you:
IDE
- All-In-One Search
- Editor Sticky Scroll
- Debugger text visualizers
- Quick add Item
- Re-authentication workflow
.NET
C++
- C11 Atomics
- Go to Definition Improvements
- Macro Expansion Improvements
- Unreal Engine Asset Inspector
- Inlining of std::move & std::forward in Debug Mode
- High-confidence Lifetime Checks
- CMake Presets Version 5
- Hot Reload in CMake Project Template
- Build Multiple CMake Targets
- Remote File Explorer
- Linux Console Integrated Terminal Support
- Dev Container Improvements
- Serial Monitor Concurrent Monitoring
- ARM64: LLVM Support
Setup and Updates
Revised: We got a bit ahead of ourselves by including the new spell-checking feature we’re working on but didn’t quite make our Preview 2 release. We’re still working on the spell checker and look forward to hearing your feedback when we release the spell checker in an upcoming preview release.
IDE
All-In-One Search
The new search experience makes it easy for you to quickly find a Visual Studio menu feature files, types, and members in your code all from one place.
We have made significant improvements to the ordering and relevancy of results in our code search. We also removed the limit to the number of results provided in the results list without compromising speed.
Code search now has a Preview Panel that supports code results for both C# and C++! By default, the preview will automatically show when you perform a search so you can immediately see the context of the selected result.
Enable All-In-One Search by going to Tools > Manage Preview Features > “New Visual Studio Search experience (restart required)”.
Edit Sticky Scroll
Sticky Scroll helps you orient where you are in the file and understand the context of the code you’re looking at. As you scroll through your code, the class and method signatures will stick to the top of the editor window. Single clicking on one of the lines in the header will quickly navigate you to that line of code.
Try this feature out by going to the Options > Text Editor > General > Sticky Scroll and toggling the checkbox for “Show the nested current scopes during the scroll at the top of the editor”.
Debugger Text Visualizers
The new and improved text visualizer is now more powerful with additional tooling and string manipulation options. You can now do URL Encode and Decode, Base64 Encode and Decode JWT easily. The new window also provides full theming support for dark, blue, and light VS themes.
Quick Add Item
The new Quick Add feature allows you to add new items to your solutions without navigating through the New Item Dialog. Add a new item as you normally would either by selecting a folder or project where you’d like a new file and selecting Add > New Item… from the context menu or by using the Ctrl+Shift+A keyboard shortcut. Add new files, such as “NewClass.cs” without browsing the template list. Quickly create nested folders, by just specifying a path. Or add multiple files or folders at once by using a “,” as a delimiter between items to scaffold out a new project. If you want to go back to the switch back to the full dialog just click “Show All Templates.”
