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Visual Studio continues to be a comprehensive IDE,investing in AI to boost development, enhancing.NET cloud-native app development, leading inC++ and game development tools, and improving fundamental development processes. We're rolling out new features and productivity enhancements designed to make software development faster and more efficient, ensuring developers have the right tools for any project.
This roadmap describes our vision for major work in Visual Studio for the upcoming year and has these key themes:
Our mission is todrive success for our customers and partners by creating the most lovable developer experience for .NET and C++ developers, and this roadmap reflects that.
The innovation around AI is accelerating and Visual Studio is at the forefront with several features in the works.
When we update existing features with AI, we’re able to add a whole new layer to the developer experience. As is often said, one of the hardest things in computer science is naming things, but with the updatedAI renaming feature, this will be easy. The reason naming is hard is because it is important to get right. Developers spend significantly more time reading code than writing code, and naming is key to understanding a code base.
The same is true for code reviews and understanding the commit history. By letting AI analyze the changes you’ve made andsuggest a relevant and detailed git commit message andpull request description, you avoid wasting a lot of time reading your code and its history.
Debugging is another key scenario that’s crucial to the success of any project. Copilot will be able to assist witherror lookups, setconditional breakpoints and tracepoints, andanalyze performance insights to make your app more reliable and performant.
When unit tests fail, determining how to get them passing again is tricky. Is it the code change you just made, or is there a problem with the unit test? Copilot will be able to assist with explaining why the test failed and suggesting what you can do to get back to a clean set of passing unit tests.
We’re continuing to improve the cloud-native development experience we introduced with .NET Aspire by bringing more features and integration into Visual Studio and the .NET Aspire dashboard. With our upcoming preview release, we’ve started a new direction in making it easier for developers topublish multi-node apps to Azure Container Apps in one gesture. Visual Studio’s right-click-publishing is taking a dependency on theAzure Developer CLI for Aspire-to-Container Apps publishing, showing a great partnership that will enable developers to publish larger apps easier, with more reproducible outcome.
This partnership will also solve the problem of enabling developers toconnect their code running on a local developer machine to in-cloud resources. ThisClone -> Provision -> Debug -> Deploy paradigm is never more prevalent than with new OpenAI initiatives; to useAzure OpenAI one must first provision an Azure OpenAI resource and configure their app to talk to it. To enable these scenarios, Web Tools and AZD teams are deepening their partnership and investigating how AZD can solve the “at-dev-time" resource-provisioning question and lead to exciting opportunities withVisual Studio Connected Services. We’d like to lead in the direction of deeper dependency on AZD’s power for provisioning and deploying both in a developer environment and in aCI/CD environment, so .NET Aspire developers’ paths to Azure are friction-free.
We are continuing to focus on improvements for all C++ developers around languageconformance,productivity enhancements,diagnostics, and especiallysafety. Cross platform and game developer workloads will continue to be an area of focus, including bringing theUnreal Engine project support to GA. We are also working on introducing innovative new capabilities inCopilot for C++ developers.
At the heart of Visual Studio is the developer experience with all its power, productivity, and customizations. Innovations in the inner loop remain a top priority and Visual Studio delivers key features for developers and enterprises alike.
We stay committed to providing a comprehensive git integration for all repositories, but for GitHub and Azure DevOps (ADO) in particular.
Complete your code reviews from creation through review with a fully featured, AI-powered GitHub and Azure DevOps Pull Request integration. Withgenerated pull request descriptions,adding pull request comments directly in the editor, andAI code review suggestions you'll context switch less - remaining in the flow and producing better code with your collaborators.
Switching betweenmultiple GitHub accounts will be a breeze as each repository will remember your preferred account, and you'll createGitHub internal repos with better guardrails to ensure security.
We are committed to providing a more reliable and faster debugging experience across all platforms. Additionally, we are focusing on implementing productivity improvements inDebug Visualizers andMemory Analysis. Moving forward, we will continue to fine-tune support for debuggingexternal sources, debuggingUnreal Projects, and handlingcross-platform debugging scenarios.
In terms of profiling, we are continuing to streamlinebenchmark .NET scenarios and integrate them withGit pipelines for a more productive development experience.
Finally, by prioritizing the enhancement of theAI-powered inner-loop experience to expedite root issue identification, we plan to make the debugging experience much simpler and smoother.
Anew version of IntelliTest is currently in preview and we are committed to addressing the feedback from this preview and releasing this new version of IntelliTest that provides support for teststargeting .NET Core and x64 devices.
We're investing in the experience around how to quickly recover from failed tests.
To start, we're addingExplain with Copilot for all failed tests. Then follow up withDebug with Copilot for failed tests. These are two examples where AI can assist the developer in quickly identifying the root cause of a failed test and provide a fix.
On top of that, wer're improving MSTest all-around for all developers - not just the ones using Visual Studio.
On the road ahead forWinForms support in Visual Studio, we’ll continue to focus on the quality and performance of the designers.
The Web Tools team focuses on improving the web development end-to-end experiences when using Visual Studio, focusing on API development inner loop productivity. We are prioritizingCloud Native scenarios with ASP.NET Core today.
We are also continuing to improveHot Reload efficiency, aiming to increase reliability in the speed at which edits are applied, but also improving the type of edits that can be reloaded automatically in a Hot Reload session.
We are listening to yourRazor feedback! Improvements in performance, completions, and general reliability of the Razor editing experiences is an area we continue to focus on each release. Please continue to provide feedback on scenarios where Razor editing does not meet your expectations.
All-in-one Code Search text support is available as a preview feature, where file and symbol search results will now be supplemented bystrings,comments,local variables, and other pieces of your code. Looking ahead, we’re working on adding more functionality with different scoping options, improving how we process queries, and looking into opportunities to bring in AI.
The new XMLsolution file format represents all data models present in the current solution file, ensuring compatibility across project structures. It simplifies conflict resolution during merges, prioritizes readability by replacing complex GUIDs with symbolic representations and human-readable names for project types, and utilizes expressions for clarity when needed. These changes aim to streamline solution file management and enhance user experience.
We’re working on reimagining the experience of configuring Visual Studio to bring a modern, more productive experience to you! Starting with 17.10, you'll be able to try a preview of this feature that brings more room for configuring settings, the ability to customize settings at the user and open solution/folder level, enhanced settings search capabilities, JSON-based storage of settings, and more. As we move through the year, we’ll continue to migrate settings to the new experience and bring additional features and capabilities to the newUnified Settings experience.
Extensions are a key part of the Visual Studio ecosystem and we're working to make it easier to manage and configure them. We recently released the ability toinstall extensions from a .vsconfig file in your repo and introduced the brand new Extension Manager to make it easy for users to find, install, and manage their extensions.
We've also continued development on the newVisualStudio.Extensibility SDK (currently in preview) that helps you build extensions that run outside the main IDE process. Bringing extensions out of the main process allows for improved performance and reliability and allows us a chance to focus on developer productivity by delivering a modern, intuitive .NET Core-based API and well-maintained documentation. We’ll soon bring some highly requested abilities to the new SDK including publishing to and management of extensions via the Visual Studio Marketplace and Visual Studio’s Extension Manager. You’ll soon find new features that make it easier toconfigure and debug your extensions, query theproject system, and create powerfuldebugger visualizers, too.
The team has been working on arefreshed UI for Visual Studio with the goal of improving productivity, creating a more inclusive environment, and keeping up with evolving global accessibility requirements. You can enable a preview of the refreshed UI by going toTools > Options and checking “Experimental control styles”. We’ve already received some feedback asking for editor light/dark theming to be independent of the shell theme and a better story forfonts and custom themes. We’ll work through these and keep an eye out for additional feedback from users like you as we polish the experience even more.