Visual Studio 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.*

Community

Free, fully-featured IDE for students, open-source contributors, and individuals.

Download Preview

Professional

Fully-featured IDE for small teams. Best if you have a Visual Studio Professional subscription.

Download Preview

Enterprise

End-to-end solution for teams of any size. Best if you have a Visual Studio Enterprise subscription.

Download Preview

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

Develop

IntelliCode

Visual Studio 2019 Version 16.1 now comes with IntelliCode, meaning you can leverage the power of AI-assisted IntelliSense without having to install an additional extension. With IntelliCode, you’ll get contextual recommendations for C#, C++, TypeScript/JavaScript, and XAML to help you code more efficiently.

Release Notes

Collaborate

GitHub extension in Visual Studio

The very popular GitHub extension is now being installed by default in Visual Studio. Connect to GitHub to clone or create repositories, view and create pull requests, and publish through the Team Explorer window.

Release Notes

Technologies

Improvements to C++

Visual Studio Preview now has code completions and quick info for built-in CMake commands, variables, and properties. This will make it much easier to edit your CMakeLists.txt files.

completions and quick info cplusplus screenshot

Release Notes

Extend

More for your development experience

In Visual Studio Preview, we have added the ability for VSIX projects to reference Shared Projects in the same solution.

VSIX projects to reference Shared Projects screenshot

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.

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

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.