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Visual Studio Preview | Visual Studio2021-01-25T14:13:44-08:00

Visual Studio Preview

Visual Studio Preview gives you early access to the latest features and improvements not yet available in the main release. To see what is in the current preview, check out the release notes.

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.*

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Community

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

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

End-to-end solution for teams of any size. Best if you have a Visual Studio Enterprise subscription.
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*If you use extensions, they will need to be installed for each instance of Visual Studio in a side by side install.

Windows ARM64 support for CMake projects and NET 5.0 source generator nodes in Solution Explorer

Windows developers can now configure a CMake project to target Windows ARM64, deploy the project to a remote Windows machine, and debug the project on a remote Windows machine from Visual Studio.

Solution Explorer now displays the new .NET 5.0 Source Generators underneath the Analyzer node so you can easily navigate and view the generated code.

Screenshot of the Source Generators node in Solution ExplorerSource Generators node in Solution Explorer

Release Notes

Enforce CodeStyle on build

The .NET Code Style analyzers can now be enforced on build. You can either install the .NET Code Style analyzers as a NuGet package for C# and Visual Basic or you can enable them in Project Properties.
Screenshot of Enforce CodeStyle on buildEnforce CodeStyle on build

Release Notes

.NET Core Debugging with WSL 2

New .NET Core debugging in WSL 2 now enables you to debug your code in WSL 2 using the Linux distro of your choice.
Debugging a .NET Core app in WSL 2

Release Notes

Enhanced Fetch, Pull, and Push action buttons in the Git Changes window

With dropdowns In Git changes window, now you can choose which remote you are targeting, in case you have multiple remotes for your repository. And in the Push dropdown, you can also push all tags that you may have created locally.
Screenshot .NET compiler platform analyzersPush dropdown in Git changes window

Release Notes

Publish automatically with GitHub Actions

In the Publish experience now you’ll be provided an option to get quickly set up with GitHub Actions, using your specified Azure resource selected and deployment secrets configured in your GitHub repository.  Visual Studio now helps you generate the Actions workflow file that will be executed now on triggers, such as Push, when you commit your code to your repository and deployment automatically happens to your Azure resources.
Publish with GitHub Actions

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

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