2022Logo Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6 Release Notes

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Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6 Releases

Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6

Support Timeframe

Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6 will be the next long term servicing channel once it's released. Enterprise and Professional users who are configured to receive updates on the 17.6 LTSC channel are supported and will receive fixes to security vulnerabilities through Jan 2025. For more information about Visual Studio supported baselines, please review the Support Policy for Visual Studio 2022.

Visual Studio 2022 Blog

The Visual Studio 2022 Blog is the official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team. You can find in-depth information about the Visual Studio 2022 releases in the following posts:

  • Visual Studio 2022 version version 17.6

  • We’ve addressed a number of your top-reported bugs in this release and added new features based on your suggestions in Developer Community. Thank you for your continued feedback. Here’s a list of your suggestion we are shipping as part of this release.

17.6.2 Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6.2

released May 25th, 2023

Summary of What's New in this Release of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6.2

Developer Community Highlights

17.6.1 Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6.1

released May 22rd, 2023

Summary of What's New in this Release of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6.1

  • We have made some updates to whatsnew content.

17.6.0 Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6

released May 16th, 2023

Summary of What's New in this Release of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6

Developer Community Highlights

F#:

  • Introduced native "Go To Definition" functionality for navigating from C# to F#.

Go To Definition: C# to F#

View supported scenarios here: #14377

  • Improved parameter name hints by hiding them when they match argument names

Improved parameter name hints

  • Enabled collapsible block comments for better readability

Collapsible comments in F#

  • Refined attribute completions by incorporating settable properties
  • Resolved a "Find All References" bug that caused results to be divided into identically labeled groups
  • Upgraded the "Go To All" feature experience by intelligently ordering results. See more details here: #14882

C++

  • Sync with Active Document now works in the CMake Targets View. It finds the first location that matches the file’s full path and syncs with that document.
  • We made improvements to the Solution - Close scenario, which makes closing a solution containing C++ projects faster. The overall perf improvements can make closing a solution in some cases from 20% faster for small codebases, to 50% faster in some cases for large solutions (1000+ projects). We expect the wins to be more noticeable in large projects. For Chromium, the improvements are typically 50% faster, saving 20 seconds of time.
  • The version of Incredibuild bundled through Visual Studio Installer has been updated to version 10.1.9. You can read the Incredbuild 10 release notes for detailed information on new features and the latest changes.
  • C++20 support for C++/CLI
    • /std:c++20 can now be used in conjunction with /clr. This allows a wide range of C++20 constructs to be used with ISO C++ types. In particular, all C++20 headers can be #included in a /clr compilation without restrictions.
    • Two-phase name lookup (ISO C++ [temp.dep]) is now the default when /std:c++20 or /std:c++17 is specified. Specifying /Zc:twoPhase- is no longer required with /std:c++17. Managed templates and generics are an exception and will be compiled as before, without two-phase lookup semantics.
    • Coroutines are always compiled to native code and any calls from managed code will incur a managed->native transition penalty.
    • Concepts are supported for native types but use with managed types is forbidden and will result in a diagnostic.
    • Module support is not yet implemented. Restricted module import support will be forthcoming in a future release.
  • You can use the new CMake Debugger to debug your CMake scripts at configure time. You can set breakpoints based on filenames, line numbers, and when CMake errors are triggered. Additionally, you can view call stacks of filenames and watch defined variables. Currently, this only works with bundled CMake, and projects targeting WSL or remote machines are not supported yet. We are actively working to add more support to the CMake debugger, and feedback is greatly appreciated.

cmake debugger

  • You can now use the Create Member Function feature to quickly add constructors and equality operators to your classes. When you have a class with fields, three dots will appear under the class name, and hovering over them will display a screwdriver icon. The drop-down from the screwdriver icon will display the new member function suggestions. With this, you can add a default constructor, constructor with all fields, equality operator, and equality operator with all fields. Create Member Function
  • HLSL (High Level Shading Language) is a DirectX-specific programming language used to create shaders in game development and rendering applications. The popular HLSL Tools extension by Tim Jones is now available as part of Visual Studio providing syntax highlighting, statement completion, go-to-definition, and more! To use HLSL Tools, please enable the component in the "Game development with C++" or "Game development with Unity" workload in the Visual Studio Installer.
  • Improved performance for Go To and All In One Search for C++ Symbols.
  • You can now view Unreal Engine logs without leaving Visual Studio. To open the log window, click View > Other Windows > Unreal Engine Log. After opening the UE log window, logs will be automatically streamed when you start the Unreal Editor with F5. You can also press the red Record button if attaching the debugger to your UE process is not feasible. To filter your logs, click on the "Categories" or "Verbosity" dropdowns.
  • You can now import STM32CubeIDE projects for embedded development within Visual Studio with File > Open > Import STM32CubeIDE project. This generates a CMake project with device flashing and debugging settings for STLink. You must have the STM32CubeIDE installed with the board support package for your device. More details available here.
  • With the new Remote File Explorer, you can browse, upload, and download files to your remote machine listed in the Connection Manager.

remote file explorer

SQL

Support for Ledger

  • The database ledger incrementally captures the state of a database as the database evolves over time, while updates occur on ledger tables. It logically uses a blockchain and Merkle tree data structures.
  • We are adding Ledger functionality in Sql Server Data Tools similar to Azure Data Studio. SQL Ledger is an added feature in SQL 2022 that brings forth new table types, including the following:
    • Append-only Ledger Tables
    • Updateable Ledger Tables
    • Ledger History Tables
    • Dropped Ledger Tables
    • Ledger Views
    • Dropped Ledger Views

remote file explorer

  • We are providing the following use cases for Ledger:
    • Viewing Ledger Tables, Views in SSOX.
    • Creating Ledger Tables, Views from SSOX
    • Creating a sqlproj with Ledger Tables. Right Click on Project-> Add Item -> Table Ledger (Updateable) or Table Ledger (Append-Only)
    • Publishing th ledger to a SQL database

remote file explorer

Git Tooling

Debugging, Diagnostics and Profiling

Breakpoint Groups

  • Visual Studio debugger now supports Breakpoint Groups,which can allow you to quickly and easily manage numerous breakpoints in organized groups.
  • You can create a new breakpoint group using the "New" dropdown in breakpoints window. To add a breakpoint to an existing group, right-click the breakpoint and choose "Add to Breakpoint Group". You can also drag and drop the breakpoint into the desired group. These breakpoint groups can be enabled, disabled, and deleted. The breakpoints can be toggled individually or in combination as needed.

Breakpoint Groups

  • The breakpoint groups also support Undo for Delete. You can use “Ctrl-z” to undo you breakpoint groups delete operation.

  • Along with this, breakpoint groups now support dependent breakpoint groups. you can make your breakpoint groups dependent on other breakpoints, so that the group only activates when the prerequisite breakpoint is hit.

Breakpoint Groups

Memory Tool Insights Sparse Arrays

  • Visual Studio Memory Analysis tool now has the ability to identify and display sparse arrays. You can see the list objects with sparse array under the Insights tab.
  • A Sparse Array is an array that is mostly filled with zero elements, which can be inefficient in terms of performance and memory usage. The memory analysis tool will automatically detect these arrays and show you how much memory is being wasted due to these zero values.

Sparse Array

  • The debugger now supports the inclusion of .natstepfilter and .natjmc files within individual solutions, rather than the previous global location. This alteration allows for more efficient collaboration within teams, as these files can now be treated as any other file within a repository and shared accordingly.

Instrumentation tool

  • The Visual Studio Instrumentation tool now supports C++ code, providing improved performance analysis. To access the instrumentation tool, go to Debug > Performance Profiler and select "Instrumentation" from the Profiler window that appears.
  • The Instrumentation Data View presents a list of functions ordered by longest-running, making it easier to identify potential bottlenecks. Additionally, the Hot Path section displays the call stack for the functions that are consuming the most CPU, providing further insight into performance issues.

Instrumentation tool

Profiler Live Graph for .NET on WSL

  • The Visual Studio profiling tools now also support live graphs while collecting from dotnet-monitor for WSL. The WSL live metrics are available for .NET object allocation, CPU usage, and the .NET counter tool.
  • While the tool is initially collecting data from dotnet-monitor for WSL you can see the real-time graphing for live counter information, then you can stop collecting and see detailed breakdown views of memory allocation, call trees, functions, collections, and other related data.

WSL_Live_Graph

.NET Object Allocation tool

  • The .NET Object Allocation tool now features the ability to import allocations from a .NET data provider using ETL file formats. For example, if you have an ETL file obtained from a .NET provider that contains allocation tick events, the tool can execute and display the allocations made within that data.

Data Visualizers

  • You can now use the IEnumerable and DataSet Visualizer to inspect your variables/objects when debugging .NET on Unix via SSH, Docker, or WSL.

cross platform visualizers

  • The HTML and XML debugger visualizer is now fully themed and supports Visual Studio's blue, light, and dark themes.

Call Stack and Parallel Stack windows

  • The call stack window now supports search functionality. You can add desired search keywords in the search box, and the matching call stack frames will get highlighted. The window also had a new entry point for the parallel stacks providing quick access to the window while debugging.

call stack search

  • The parallel stack window now has new copy functionality. You can double-click on a frame to copy the stack/ shift & select frames of interest / select particular by clicking on the line and copy and then paste into your local notepad/excel to evaluate further.

Reattach to process

  • The reattach to debugger process is now persistent to the solution/project across sessions. So you can reattach to processes that you were previously attached to, even after you open a new VS session.

Git Tooling Enhancements

Stage and Commit During Build

You can now stage your changes and commit your staged items during a build. Committing directly is a risky operation since your files may change, but now you can stage them, verify your files are correct, and commit them - all while a build is running.

GitHub Issues and Azure DevOps Work Items - Improved Search

Improving on our Issues and Work Items integration in the commit message, you now get better search results when querying for items that you haven't updated recently or that aren't related to you but are part of your project or repo. The search works by matching complete strings in your items' names. This can help minimize copy-pasting item ids between the browser and Visual Studio.

Improved Merge Dialog

Updates to our Merge Dialog make it easier to understand how many files are being affected and warn you if there might be conflicts.

merge dialog

Git History Perf Improvements

Drastic improvements to our Git History window now load previous commits faster, allowing you to dig into your file and folder history quicker than before!

git log demo

New Branch and Tag Naming Enhancements

Improvements to the New Branch and New Tag dialogs automatically replace spaces with dashes to avoid invalid characters in the name.

new branch

GitHub Issues

The GitHub Issues integration allows you to search and reference your issues from the commit message box in VS, in response to this suggestion ticket. You can reference an issue or a pull request by typing # or clicking on the # button in the lower right side of the commit message text box. If you weren't already authenticated to access related issues, you will now be prompted to sign in to take advantage of this feature.

Line Unstaging

To continue improving our line-staging (aka interactive staging) feature, we've added unstage. You can now use the tool tip option to unstage changes, line by line, as requested here Unstage individual lines and hunks in a file - 4 votes

Arm64

We continue to build native support for Arm64 on Windows 11 for the most popular developer scenarios. We now support the .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) workload on Arm64 Visual Studio.

Code Search and Navigation

All-In-One Search

We’ve updated the UI of All-in-One Search.

  • Each result has more breathing room by taking up 2 lines of space.
  • The window size and location persist from the last session of Visual Studio. The selected preview state (off, right, or bottom) is also saved.
  • The default preview layout is set to the bottom.

Learn more at https://aka.ms/all-in-one-search-blog.

You can enable All-In-One Search: Tools > Manage Preview Features > "New Visual Studio Search experience (restart required)".

Sticky Scroll

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 and other headers will stick to the top of your screen. Clicking on a line in the header will navigate you to that code.
  • Customize the maximum number of lines with "Maximum sticky lines".
  • With “When number of scopes exceeds the maximum”, choose between higher-level scopes “Prefer outer scopes” or lower-level scopes “Prefer inner scopes”.

Enable in "Options > Text Editor > General > Sticky scroll (experimental)" by toggling the checkbox for "Group the current scopes within a scrollable region of the editor window".

Learn more at https://aka.ms/sticky-scroll-blog.

Brace Pair Colorization

Brace pair colorization

With brace pair colorization, you can visually distinguish each set of opening and closing braces for your code making it easier to see your code's scope or find any missing braces.

Brace pair colorization is supported for C#, C++, TypeScript, JavaScript, Visual Basic, and Razor.

You can enable or disable colorization by going to Tools > Options > Text Editor and toggling the "Enable brace pair colorization" checkbox.

Lightbulb Performance Improvements

The lightbulb/code actions have been greatly improved through comprehensive redesign of the diagnostics and code analysis architecture. We have focused on optimizing all components involved in bringing up a lightbulb through a combination of low/medium/high level fixes.

  • Low level fixes included limiting tree walks, more efficient string handling, improving efficiency in handling source text, extreme reduction in allocations, conversions, enumerations and data structure level optimizations in the diagnostics code paths
  • Medium level fixes included cancelling background diagnostics (squiggles) when computing Lightbulb diagnostics, optimizing the background indexing, optimizing the diagnostics engine for queries run on a single document by limiting analyzers that are applicable per document, addressing significant inefficiencies in several 1st party/2nd party analyzers like PublicAPI analyzer and by improving our caching model
  • High level fixes included heaving reworking the diagnostics pipeline to answer span oriented questions, infer which analyzers are applicable to run on particular spans, deprioritizing slow analyzers based on historical run info.

BEFORE & AFTER

![Before Lightbulb takes 7 cycles to complete](media/17.6/17.6ga-lightbulb-before.gif =400x) ![After Lightbulb is instaneous](media/17.6/17.6ga-lightbulb-after.gif =400x)

We've significantly improved both CPU and memory performance, particularly for large source files. In fact, we've managed to reduce the progress bar cycles of the Lightbulb scenario in a large source file from around 8-17 cycles to less than one cycle, as demonstrated in the gifs above.

Microsoft Teams Development Tools (Teams Toolkit)

  • Add the feature flag "Teams App Configuration Improvements". The preview feature of Teams Toolkit enables developers to bring their existing internal and SaaS applications into Teams with Teams-native integration. In the teamsfxapp.yml file defines what Teams Toolkit engine does.
  • Add the deep link to open Teams Toolkit directly from Teams developer portal. You can now open Teams projects in developer portal and edit in Teams Toolkit.
  • We have introduced a new Teams App templates for you to start with: Workflow Bot. Use the new Workflow Bot template to create sequential workflows where Adaptive Cards can be returned in response to user input.
  • We have also made several bug fixes.

Enterprise Management

Host and Deploy Visual Studio layouts from your intranet

IT Administrators will now be able to host and deploy layouts on an intranet website in addition to a file share. Using an intranet location can simplify layout maintenance and improve installation performance, particularly for those organizations that currently use multiple global network file shares. View guidance for how to enable this experience and leave us feedback to let us know if there's anything we can do to improve it.

Updates to the Product Offerings on the Installer's Available tab

We’ve updated the logic that governs which products are offered when you view the Visual Studio installer’s “Available” tab. You should now have easy access to both the current Previews, as well as the latest versions of SKUs you already have installed. IT Administrators also have the ability to restrict exposure to certain products by either disabling specific channels or by using the new HideAvailableTab policy to suppress the visibility of the Available tab.

Latest Installer Everywhere

We will start shipping the latest installer everywhere, which means that all future updates to all versions of Visual Studio 2017 and higher will include the latest installer. This means that any new functionality or bug fixes that we add to the latest installer (such as the ability to rollback an installation sourced from a layout) will be automatically available to use in those downlevel versions of the product. Using the --useLatestInstaller parameter in your acquisition scripts will no longer be necessary.

Rollback is now enabled for Product Installations Sourced from a Layout

You can now rollback an update if the product sources originated from a layout. Just make sure that the layout contains the packages needed for the rollback to be successful. More details can be found here.

.NET MAUI

Known Issues

  • When upgrading to the .NET 7.0.3xx SDK Razor / Blazor customers may encounter an error of the form  Multiple components use the tag '....'

    This is due to a bug in the razor compiler that is being addressed. Until that is fixed users can work around the issue by pinning the 7.0.20xx SDK using global.json.  https://github.com/dotnet/razor/issues/8718

  • RoslynPackage fails to initialize due to SettingsEditorFactory dependency error After upgrading Visual Studio to version 17.6.1, some customers have encountered an issue where Visual Studio fails to load Roslyn and other packages. This problem occurs due to an assembly mismatch.

    Solution: To resolve the issue, upgrade Visual Studio to version 17.6.2 and restart the Visual Studio.

    Additional solution: If you are still experiencing the error after upgrading, they you can try deleting the MEF cache files located at %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\17.0_XXXX\ComponentModelCache, where XXXX is a random ID. Before deleting the files it is recommended to take a backup of them. Then restart the Visual Studio.

Feedback and suggestions

We would love to hear from you! You can Report a Problem or Suggest a Feature Feedback Icon by using the Send Feedback icon in the upper right-hand corner of either the installer or the Visual Studio IDE, or from Help > Send Feedback. You can track your issues by using Visual Studio Developer Community, where you add comments or find solutions. You can also get free installation help through our Live Chat support.

Blogs

Take advantage of the insights and recommendations available in the Developer Tools Blogs site to keep you up-to-date on all new releases and include deep dive posts on a broad range of features.

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