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Visual Studio Preview | Visual Studio2020-04-02T14:07:30-07:00

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.

Integrated terminal and flexible tab layout

Visual Studio now features an integrated terminal experience, with profiles available for Developer PowerShell, Developer Command Prompt, and any available WSL distros. The integrated terminal shares most of its core with the Windows Terminal, which results in a more robust terminal experience, and faster adoption of new functionality.
In addition to managing your document tabs on top of the code editor, you can now manage them in a vertical list on either the left or right side the editor.
Screenshot of demonstration of vertical tabs

Release Notes

A new Git and GitHub experience

Visual Studio now has a revamped Git experience to provide a great experience working with code on GitHub and elsewhere. Start coding by browsing online repositories hosted on GitHub and cloning them directly from within Visual Studio. For new projects, you can initialize a local Git repository and push it to be hosted on GitHub (private or public) in a single click. Once your code is loaded, the new Git tool window consolidates the interactions with your code, minimizing context-switching between tools and applications.
Collaborate screenshot Collaborate animation

Release Notes

No restarts required for Snapshot Debugger

In our latest release of Snapshot Debugger, not only will an app redeployment be unnecessary; users will no longer be required to restart their Azure App Service (.NET Core 3.1) when enabling Snapshot Debugger for the first time. You can simply start a Snapshot Debugger session and attach to your captured snapshots to inspect variables, use the Locals, Watches, and Call Stack windows, and even evaluate expressions. All this can be done while your website remains live and the end user experience is unaffected.
Snapshot Debugger screenshot Snapshot Debugger screenshot animation

.NET Core 3.1 projects

You can now create .NET Core 3.1 projects in Visual Studio 2019. Additionally, you can publish worker projects to Azure Container Registry, DockerHub, and more. Visual Studio now has support for adding new Open API & GRPC service references to .NET Core 3.1 projects.

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.

Try Preview in Azure
Screenshot of creating a virtual machine
Developer Community Release Notes Blog

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