Visual Studio 2019 Preview

Be the first to access the future of Visual Studio

What’s in it for me
Our pre-release gives you early access to the new features not yet in Visual Studio.

Try side by side
Install the Preview right alongside your main release, leaving your production install undisturbed.*

Download Preview

*If you use extensions, they will need to be installed for each instance of Visual Studio in a side by side install.

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Preview

Be the first to access the future of Visual Studio for Mac

What’s in it for me
Our pre-release gives you early access to the new features not yet in Visual Studio.

Try side by side
Experience the new IDE alongside your main release, leaving your production install undisturbed.*

Visual Studio for Mac Community, Professional, and Enterprise

A C# development environment for iOS, Android, web, and game developers.

Download Preview

*Visual Studio Preview for Mac does not support some extendability options, and also requires a minimum of Visual Studio for Mac 7.7, Mono 5.16. and if selected, Xamarin.iOS 12.2.1, Xamarin.Android 9.1.0, and Xamarin.Mac 5.2.1.

Summary

Visual Studio 2019 Highlights

Whether you’re new to coding or ready for your next project, Visual Studio 2019 streamlines your experience so you can get right down to focused work. You’ll find more screen space for your code and you can search for anything from one place. You can keep your code tidy with one-click code clean-up. When you’re debugging, you’ll notice better stepping performance and you’ll get search capabilities within the Autos, Locals, and Watch windows to quickly find that elusive object or value.

Video summary of updates coming in Visual Studio 2019

Release Notes

Develop

Intellicode and One-click Code Cleanup

Write your code faster with context-aware, AI-powered IntelliSense, that is provided by Visual Studio IntelliCode. You can now also train IntelliCode on your own code repositories to share with your team.

Visual Studio IntelliCode demo of custom modeling in C++ screenshot

Drive code maintainability and fix warnings and suggestions with one-click code clean up, and use more refactoring capabilities than ever. A document health indicator will help you get your code “to green”.

Release Notes

Collaboration

Live Share and PR Experience

With Visual Studio Live Share, you can collaborate in real-time whether your team members are working from home or across the world. Live Share installs by default and supports all projects, app types, and languages.

Sharing of two code bases with LiveShare screenshot

When you’re ready to check in your code, try the new pull request (PR) experience. It lets you and your team quickly review code (even run the app and debug!) from Azure Repos directly in the IDE.

Animation of the new pull request experience

Release Notes

Debug

Search Window and Snapshot Debugger

Improved stepping performance and support for large C++ apps enhance your debugging experience. New search capabilities in Autos, Locals, and Watch windows help you find objects or values, or visualize Collections.

Screenshot of search capability in a C++ debug window

With new app targets for Snapshot Debugger, you can debug issues in a production environment without impacting performance or stability. It takes a snapshot of the environment so you can inspect objects and call stacks.

Animation of attaching the Snapshot Debugger to a Azure Kubernetes Service

Release Notes

Azure

Connected Services and Azure App Services

Configure your applications to use Azure services with just a few clicks. You can create new instances of Azure Storage, Key Vault, Cognitive Services, and more without ever leaving the IDE.

Creating a new Azure Storage instance in the IDE animation

Start developing your code locally and offline until you are ready to deploy. Then publish directly to Azure in minutes, not hours, targeting virtual machines, containers, or Azure App Service.

Screenshot of picking a publish target for Azure App Services

Release Notes

Technologies

.NET Core 3 and C++ Improvements

Visual Studio 2019 gives your current projects the full-fledged support they need across any platform including desktop, web, mobile, and games. It also supports .NET Core 3, one of the fastest frameworks on the planet.

With support for Linux targeting, and CMake and ClangFormat support, Visual Studio 2019 is the most complete IDE for C++ developers. C# and F# developers can build native cross-platform apps with Xamarin.

Video of support for C++ updates in Visual Studio 2019

Release Notes

Be more productive

Visual Studio for Mac has a new, optimized start experience to help both new and existing developers begin working on their next app, game, or website with ease.

If you’re new to Visual Studio for Mac then you’ll be able to jump straight into a brand new project by choosing from one of our predefined templates. For existing Visual Studio for Mac users, you’ll notice the improved layout with all your recent projects, right on the center of your screen.

Release Notes

What is a Preview?

Visual Studio Preview gives you early access to the latest features and improvements not yet available in the main release. By trying Preview, you can take advantage of new builds and updates that ship on a frequent cadence. For more information on Visual Studio Preview installs, visit our FAQ page.

Please note that the preview version is continuously evolving and certain features may not work as expected. This version is also not licensed to build shipping applications. If you would like to build production application you can access stable release of Visual Studio from our downloads page.

What is a Preview?

Visual Studio for Mac Preview gives you early access to the latest features and improvements not yet available in the main release. By trying the Preview you can take advantage of new builds that ship frequently.

Please note that the preview version is continuously evolving, and certain features may not work as expected. This version is also not licensed to build shipping applications. If you would like to build production applications, you can access stable release of Visual Studio for Mac from our downloads page.

Engage with our community

We believe that to create a great product for you, we should listen to and engage with you in every stage of our development.
As you evaluate what’s next with Visual Studio Preview, report a bug or suggest a feature in our developer community, where you can talk directly to our product engineers. Your feedback empowers us to evolve and ensure the highest quality in our final product.

Developer Community

Engage with our community

We believe that to create a great product for you, we should listen to and engage in every stage of our development.
As you evaluate what’s next with Visual Studio for Mac Preview, report a bug or suggest a feature in our developer community, where you can talk directly to our product engineers. Your feedback empowers us to evolve and ensure the highest quality in our final product.

Developer Community

Save install time

… in an Azure Virtual Machine
Try Visual Studio Preview in an environment that is entirely separate from your local development machine. Preview is pre-installed on a Windows server, saving you time on your Visual Studio install process.
Activate your free Azure account and claim your Azure credits which include $200 to use in your first month.

Try Preview in Azure

microsoft-azure-create-a-virtual-machine

Visual Studio Blog

Making every developer more productive with Visual Studio 2019

December 4th, 2018 by John Montgomery

In Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1, we’ve focused on a few key areas, such as making it faster to open and work with projects stored in git repositories, improving IntelliSense with Artificial Intelligence (AI) (a feature we call Visual Studio IntelliCode), and making it easier to collaborate with your teammates by integrating Live Share. With each preview we’ll be adding capabilities, improving performance, and refining the user experience, and we absolutely want your feedback.

Visual Studio Blog

Making every developer more productive with Visual Studio 2019

December 4th, 2018 by John Montgomery

In Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1, we’ve focused on a few key areas, such as making it faster to open and work with projects stored in git repositories, improving IntelliSense with Artificial Intelligence (AI) (a feature we call Visual Studio IntelliCode), and making it easier to collaborate with your teammates by integrating Live Share. With each preview we’ll be adding capabilities, improving performance, and refining the user experience, and we absolutely want your feedback.