Microsoft has unveiled a host of developer tools, including a preview of the Visual Studio 2022 64-bit, before this developer event scheduled for June 24.
Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1 comes straight from the never say never department next version after version of the remaining resolutely 32-bit toolset, even though the hardware world has changed around it.
The move to 64-bit was announced earlier this year and is ambitious given Visual Studio’s ecosystem and codebase size.
Far be it for us to wonder how much nonsense could be lurking in a product that has its roots in the previous century.
“The 64-bit conversion effort affects every part of Visual Studio, so the reach is much greater than our usual previews,” Justin Johnson, senior program manager at Microsoft, explained in a blog post on the subject, which means that the first version isn’t so much about whizzbanging new features (although there are improvements to IntelliCode even though some bits of VS2019 are missing right now) but more about seeing if the old thing stays right while the programmers push it.
Microsoft is particularly keen on developers launching huge and complex solutions at the preview that would have caused wobbles in previous versions. The company boasted that “customers could run the IDE for days, even with solutions containing 700 (or more!) Projects.”
Maybe this hack is a bit old-fashioned, but surely there is an argument to be made that rather than allowing development tools to grow like a helium balloon heading into space, get a solution that not so bloated could be made easier by rethinking rather than adding even more memory.
While Visual Studio can now use more system resources, its extension ecosystem has not performed as well – Microsoft has warned that vendors will need updates before these same extensions appear in Visual Studio 2022. That may not bode well for that one. strange component that has long been abandoned but still depends on a developer.
The release was accompanied by updates to .NET 6 and ASP.NET Core in the form of a Preview 5 as well as an updated Preview of the .NET Cross-Platform Application UI (MAUI ). Microsoft also announced a developer event at 3 p.m. ET on June 24, on the heels of his “What’s next for Windows” show.
After all, there’s no point in having a shiny new operating system unless you can encourage developers to target code on it. ®
