It’s official: Visual Studio 2019 has launched!

  • Article

With the April 2 public launch of Visual Studio 2019, developers worldwide can now use the most productive, modern, and innovative Visual Studio yet. The latest generation of Visual Studio—in Community, Professional, and Enterprise editions—delivers new levels of productivity for every developer, fuller and more effective team collaboration, and AI-powered innovation. If you didn’t catch the livestream for the virtual launch, or attend a day-of event, no worries. You can view recordings of the virtual launch here.

Many of you had the opportunity to work with Visual Studio 2019 during the four-month preview period that began in December. Thanks! Your feedback helped us to add capabilities, improve performance, and refine the developer experience. For those of you now meeting Visual Studio 2019 for the first time, prepare for better, faster ways to deliver the business value that your enterprise users or external customers demand. For example,

  • Get more productive with one-click code clean-up. Search in debug windows. Access integrated pull requests.
  • Exploit modern features including .NET Core 3 support, cross-platform C++, and Docker and Kubernetes support.
  • Leverage innovation including AI-powered code completion, real-time coding collaboration, and production debugging.

 

Be more productive right away

Visual Studio 2019 opens with a new start window on launch. This experience is better designed to work with today’s Git repositories – whether local repos or online Git repos on GitHub, Azure Repos, or elsewhere. Once you’re in the IDE, you’ll notice a cleaner interface and a more compact title and menu bar. A new search experience replaces the previous “Quick Launch” box. You can now search for settings, commands, and install options. The new search experience is also smarter, supporting fuzzy string searching to help find what you’re looking for even when you don’t have the spelling quite right.

When you’re coding, Visual Studio 2019 makes it easier to get your work done quickly, with new capabilities including code maintainability and consistency. We’ve added new refactoring capabilities to make it even easier to keep your code in good shape. With the new document health indicator and code clean-up functionality, you can now easily identify and fix warnings and suggestions with the click of a button.

Common debugging tasks are also easier. Stepping performance is improved, allowing for a much smoother debugging experience. We’ve added search capabilities to the Autos, Locals, and Watch windows, which will help you track down objects and values. In addition, we’ve added Time Travel Debugging for managed code, updates to the Snapshot Debugger to target Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS), and better performance when debugging large C++ projects, thanks to an out-of-process 64-bit debugger.

[embed width="720" height="480"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DANLUUIUrcM[/embed]

 

Collaborate more

Building on the work we started in Visual Studio 2017, we improved Visual Studio IntelliCode—our context-aware and AI-powered IntelliSense—so you can train it on your own code repositories and share the results with your team. IntelliCode reduces the number of keystrokes you need because the completion lists are prioritised on the most common coding patterns for that API combined with the context of the code in your existing project.

The Visual Studio Live Share feature helps you collaborate in real time with anyone across the globe using Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code. With Live Share, you can immediately invite your teammates to join your coding session to take care of a bug or help make a quick change. You’ll also find it’s easier to start a session and view the people you’re working with.

With the brand-new pull request (PR) experience in Visual Studio 2019, you can review, run, and even debug pull requests from your team without leaving the IDE.

 

Deliver the most modern code

.NET Core 3 is a major .NET update and Visual Studio 2019 is the way to build .NET Core 3 applications for any platform. Visual Studio 2019 also includes improved support for cross-platform C++ development, as well as .NET mobile development for iOS and Android with Xamarin.

 

Learn more

With the production release of Visual Studio 2019, there’s never been a better time to learn all about how you and your team can take advantage of it. And there’s no better place to start than here. Of course, seeing is believing, and you can begin to do that right now too, by downloading Visual Studio 2019 and trying it out for yourself.