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Visual Studio Preview | Visual Studio2020-09-22T08:00:08-07:00

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.
Download Preview
Visual Studio Win 2019 logo

Professional

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

C++ 20 Conformance, IntelliCode enhancements, and GitHub Codespaces integration

For C++ developers, we’ve improved support for major C++20 features across our compiler, standard library, and IDE. C++20 Coroutines and C++20 Modules are now feature-complete and available under /std:c++latest. IntelliSense now provides support for C++20 and headers, and rename and browsing for concept definitions. We have upgraded the version of CMake shipped with Visual Studio to CMake 3.18, enabling you to use CMake profiling feature, and more.
With IntelliCode, now you can train a custom model just for your codebase, based on your usages of those types. Once you successfully build a C# or C++ solution, IntelliCode will prompt you via an infobar prompt to automate model training to get custom completion “stars” for your own types.
Teams completions with IntelliCode
GitHub Codespaces for Visual Studio is now available as a limited beta. GitHub Codespaces gives you an instant dev environment in the cloud to develop from anywhere.
Screenshot of Creating GitHub Codespaces from Visual StudioCreate GitHub Codespaces from Visual Studio

Release Notes

New code analysis experience and refactoring improvements for .NET

NET compiler platform (Roslyn) analyzers inspect your C# or Visual Basic code for security, performance, design, and other issues. Starting in .NET 5.0, these analyzers are included with the .NET SDK. Code analysis is enabled, by default, for projects that target .NET 5.0 or later. You can enable code analysis on projects that target earlier .NET versions by setting the EnableNETAnalyzers property to true.
Screenshot .NET compiler platform analyzers.NET compiler platform analyzers
Inline method refactoring that helps you replace usages of a static, instance, and extension method within a single statement body with an option to remove the original method declaration.

Release Notes

Debug Linux core dumps on remote Linux System or WSL

You can now debug Linux core dumps on a remote Linux system or WSL directly from Visual Studio by simply dragging and dropping a managed Linux core dump directly into your IDE and immediately start debugging.
Screenshot of Debugging Linux core dumpsDebug Linux core dumps

Release Notes

A new Git and GitHub experience

Now you can add your GitHub account using the familiar Visual Studio account management experience. The version control, integrated terminal, and other features will then be able to leverage your account credentials.
Add your GitHub account in Visual Studio
We have been expanding and improving the support for Git source control workflows, with the new Git tools. Now you can open a Git repository from a list of your local repositories in the Git menu.
Screnshot of a List of local repositories in Git menuList of local repositories in Git menu

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

.NET 5 projects

Visual Studio has the best support for .NET 5 projects. It provides integrated tooling for C# 9 and the latest features for configuring new analysis levels that safely introduce recommended patterns into your code.

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

Developer Community Release Notes Blog

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