Visual Studio 2022 Roadmap

  • Article

This roadmap describes our vision for major work in Visual Studio 2022 for the calendar year 2021. Visual Studio 2022 has three key themes:

  • Personal and Team productivity: we want to empower developers and teams with incredible scale and performance, a trusted and secure toolchain, and a more accessible, personalized environment.
  • Modern Development: we are building the tools to develop modern apps faster.
  • Constant Innovation: we are investing in improved collaboration, actionable diagnostics, and code assistance.

Visual Studio 2022 will be the first 64-bit version of Visual Studio. In addition to the speed and performance advantages afforded by more memory access, Visual Studio brings UI enhancements, more personalization options, and a continued focus on empowering developers. Upgrading to Visual Studio 2022 should be a low-friction experience and should not require your code to change. You can still build 32-bit, and all of your existing applications, in Visual Studio 2022.

For the Visual Studio 2019 roadmap, see Visual Studio 2019 Roadmap.

For more details on our vision for Visual Studio 2022, read our Visual Studio 2022 announcement blog.

General

We’re improving developer productivity by moving the main devenv.exe process from 32-bit to 64-bit. This will effectively eliminate out-of-memory errors, especially for large, complex solutions. We are incorporating user feedback to continually innovate on how developers load, search, and interact with code. We are improving the new project creation experience.

Visual Studio 2022 will be more accessible than ever. We're making accessibility-related options more discoverable, and audio cue availability is expanding. We are integrating the Accessibility Insights Engine to empower developers to build modern, accessible applications. Developers will have more personalization options in Visual Studio 2022 and improved ability to sync settings across multiple machines. We are also updating icons, themes, and fonts for a modern, updated experience.

For details, see Visual Studio on Developer Community.

Diagnostics

Diagnostics in Visual Studio 2022 is focused on innovating on our world-class diagnostics experience. We're improving breakpoints to be draggable, adding dependent breakpoints and the ability to force Run. We are improving the analyzation tools for crash dumps, memory dumps, and memory pressure analysis. Finally, we are adding cross-platform support for debugging C++ and .NET code on ARM64 devices.

For details on debugging, see Debugging on Developer Community.

For details on profiling, see Profiling on Developer Community.

Personalization

Visual Studio 2022 is more flexible than ever, to accommodate a wider range of developer preferences. We've added new ways to organize your workspace, new community themes, and the ability to convert VS Code themes to work in Visual Studio. Depending on the time of day, the amount of ambient light, or your preferences, Visual Studio can help boost productivity. In the upcoming releases, we are looking to provide increased flexibility with color tabs and theme creation.

Editor

The Visual Studio 2022 editor will have a built-in spell-checker to help you code more accurately with fewer errors. We’re innovating on code readability and adding new ways to navigate such as multi-caret editing and "Camel Hump" navigation. Users of screen readers will enjoy better feedback on code problems.

For details, see Visual Studio Editor on Developer Community.

Extensibility

Extensions play an important role in customizing the Visual Studio experience. We’re making essential extensions more reliable and secure. We're also improving the development, migration, and publishing experience for extensions.

IntelliCode

The IntelliCode team is continuing to focus on anticipating your next move. Visual Studio 2022 will introduce larger completions and help you take the right action, in the right place, at the right time.

For details, see Intellicode on Developer Community.

NuGet

The NuGet team is focused on providing support for .NET 6, securing the software supply chain, and empowering every developer and their team to achieve more through a unified, productive, and loved package manager with excellent fundamentals.

For details, see NuGet on Developer Community.

Setup and Installation

The Setup and Installation team focus is facilitating the ability for enterprises to stay secure by easily deploying updates in managed enterprise environments. We are enabling enterprises to use multiple layout folders for updating a client instance, use multiple supported baselines, and move their installations between channels. We are also adding the ability for users to roll back Visual Studio to a working environment after a failed update.

For details, see Visual Studio Setup and Installation on Developer Community.

Version Control

Visual Studio 2022 will continue to innovate on integrated source control tools. We're improving productivity by supporting more complex Git workflows such as simultaneously activating multiple Git repositories. Developers will be able to stage individual lines or hunks of code and see improved diffs and details. We’re also improving GitHub and Azure DevOps integration, bringing functionality closer to your developer workflow.

For details, see Visual Studio Git Experience on Developer Community

C++

The C++ team is focused on workload innovation through language conformance, diagnostics, and security. Visual Studio 2022 will add support for C++20 language features that simplify management of large code bases. We are integrating support for CMake, Linux, and WSL to make it easier to create and debug cross-platform apps.

For details, see C++ on Developer Community

.NET

The .NET team is focused on a modern app development experience, improving .NET 5 support and adding .NET 6 support. We are also focusing on productivity with built-in code assistance. Finally, we are working on a full designer experience for Windows Forms with .NET 5.

For details, see .NET on Developer Community.

Container Tools

The Container Tools team is focused on improving the experience for .NET developers building containerized applications. Our main focus will be to improve the ability to diagnose containerized apps using the Containers tool window.

For other roadmaps related to .NET, see:

WinForms

The team is working on improving reliability and performance of the new designer for .NET Core/.NET 5/.NET 6 WinForms applications, fixing HighDPI issues, implementing new data binding scenarios and addressing customers feedback.

For details, see:

Web Tools

The Web Tools team is focused on improving the web development process in .NET using Azure developer services. We are improving dependency configuration, expanding Azure hosting options for publishing, and optimizing storage.

For details, see:

XAML and Xamarin

The XAML team is working on improving tooling for developers’ productivity such as XAML Live Preview, XAML and C# hot reload, etc. The XAMARIN team is creating a new .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) which is already available as a Preview feature and allows to build native client apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android with a single codebase. We are finalizing the feature set and will be working on improving quality and addressing customers feedback.

For details, see: