What's new in Visual Studio 2022

  • Article

Updated for the 17.11 release. See full release notes | View product roadmap

Download Visual Studio 2022

With Visual Studio 2022, you'll always get the best-in-class tools and services available for any developer, any app, and any platform. Whether you're using Visual Studio for the first time or you've been using it for years, there's a lot to like in our newest version.

Want to see what's new in each updated release from within Visual Studio itself? Now you can! From the menu bar, select Help > What's New to view recent highlights.

Screenshot of the in-product notification of what's new in each updated release of Visual Studio.

Tip

For more news + how-to's, check out our Visual Studio social media channels on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, Twitter, & TikTok. And for the latest info on recent releases, current experiments, and what's in Preview, be sure to visit the Visual Studio Blog.

AI-assisted development

With a subscription to GitHub Copilot, you can get answers to questions and consult with an AI while you code. Visual Studio 2022 version 17.4 and later include integration with GitHub Copilot, and version 17.6 and later also support GitHub Copilot Chat. See AI-assisted development.

In version 17.9 and later, try out AI-generated commit messages.

Performance improvements

Visual Studio 2022 is faster, more approachable, more lightweight, and is designed for both learners and those building industrial scale solutions. Plus, we continue to focus on performance with each iterative release. To learn more, see the Visual Studio 2022 – 17.5 Performance Enhancements blog post.

Visual Studio 2022 is 64-bit

Visual Studio 2022 on Windows is now a 64-bit application. This means you can open, edit, run, and debug even the biggest and most complex solutions without running out of memory. To learn more, see both the Visual Studio 2022 vision and Visual Studio 2022 17.0 Preview blog posts.

Find in Files is faster

In Visual Studio 2022, we focused on improving the performance of several key features. For example, Find in Files is now as much as 3x faster when searching large solutions such as Orchard Core.

Animation of the Find in Files feature as it searches a large C# solution three times faster than the previous version of Visual Studio.

New in 17.1: With new indexed searching, Find in Files is even faster! For more information, see the Code search in Visual Studio 2022 is about to get much faster blog post.

New in 17.8: Save time with case-preserving search and replace. See Replace in files - Preserve case.

Tip

To learn more about current and upcoming changes to the search experience in Visual Studio 2022, see the Sneak Peek and Edit Your Code While You Search blog post.

Git tooling is faster

New in 17.8, you can create a pull request from the Visual Studio IDE. Also, try the new summary view for diffs, to make it easier to focus on what changed.

New in 17.2: We've integrated a relatively new Git feature called the commit graph, which helps to improve both the performance of your Git operations and the performance of Visual Studio itself. For the latest info, see the Supercharge your Git experience in Visual Studio 2022 blog post.

Build modern apps

Visual Studio 2022 makes it quick and easy to build modern, cloud-based applications with Azure. See Azure development with Visual Studio. As well, our new version also has full support for .NET and its unified framework for web, client, and mobile apps for both Windows and Mac developers. And, Visual Studio 2022 includes robust support for the C++ workload with new productivity features, C++20 tooling, and IntelliSense.

Tip

To learn more about .NET 8, the successor to .NET 7, see What's new in .NET 8.

Better dev tools for C++ and .NET, and Hot Reload

Visual Studio 2022 includes better cross-platform app development tools and the latest version of C++ build tools, to include C++20 support.

As well, we're updating Hot Reload so that you can edit either C++ or .NET projects while your application is running. For more information, see the Speed up your .NET and C++ development with Hot Reload in Visual Studio 2022 blog post, and the Write and debug running code with Hot Reload in Visual Studio with C#, C++, or Visual Basic Docs page.

Updates for Blazor & Razor editors + Hot Reload for ASP.NET

Visual Studio 2022 includes a big update for the Blazor and Razor editors, and new capabilities for Hot Reload in ASP.NET Core—including Hot Reload when you save a file or when you apply changes to CSS files live!

Animation of Hot Reload in Razor and Blazor apps, and in CSS files live.

Innovation at your fingertips

From real-time & asynchronous collaboration tools to improved insights and productivity tools that seamlessly integrate with your daily workflow, Visual Studio 2022 has this and more.

Git multi-repo support and line-staging support

New in 17.4: If you've worked with projects hosted on different Git repositories, you might have used external tools or multiple instances of Visual Studio to connect to them. Now, you can work with a single solution that has projects in multiple repositories and contribute to them all from a single instance of Visual Studio. To learn more, see the Multi-repo support in Visual Studio and Multi-repository support released blog posts, along with the Work with multiple repos page.

New in 17.3: We added line-staging support, also known as interactive staging. Now, you can stage chunks of changes in your files right from the code editor, or split changes across different commits. For more information, see the Stage lines of code in Visual Studio page.

IntelliCode improvements

Designing for everyone

We’re refreshing the user interface to better keep you in your flow. Some of the changes include cosmetic touches that modernize the UI or reduce crowding.

Look & feel

From new iconography to subtle color contrast ratio adjustments and a new Cascadia Code font, we're working to make Visual Studio 2022 more accessible for everyone. For all the details, see the We’ve upgraded the UI in Visual Studio 2022 blog post.

Screenshot of the contrast between previous and refreshed icons in Visual Studio.

Personalization

One of our key focus areas is to make Visual Studio more personalized and flexible so that you can make the IDE your own. For example, Visual Studio 2022 offers you the ability to sync with your Windows theme. So, if you've enabled the "night light" feature there, Visual Studio uses it, too. For more info, see the Personalize your Visual Studio 2022 blog post.

Tip

To learn more about the latest tabs and docs updates in Visual Studio 2022, see the Improved doc management personalization blog post.

What's next

Want to know more about what we're planning for Visual Studio 2022? See the Roadmap page, the Preview release notes, and the Visual Studio Blog for details.

Give us feedback

Why send feedback to the Visual Studio team? Because we take customer feedback seriously. It drives much of what we do.

  • If you want to make a suggestion about how we can improve Visual Studio, you can do so by using the Suggest a Feature tool.

  • If you experience an issue where Visual Studio stops responding, crashes, or other performance issues, you can easily share repro steps and supporting files with us by using the Report a Problem tool.

Related content

Review the following blog posts to learn more about the improvements we've made to Visual Studio 2022, to date: