Microsoft announced today that Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 6 are now generally available for developers. Each is a major milestone in its own right.

“Visual Studio 2022 will help you go from idea to code faster than ever,” Microsoft corporate vice president Amanda Silver writes in the Visual Studio announcement post. “Developer productivity and quality-of-life improvements are at the heart of Visual Studio 2022, and we’re excited for you to try it out. Simply put, Visual Studio 2022 will let you bring your ideas to life.”

Famously, Visual Studio 2022 is the first 64-bit release of the long-running integrated development environment. It features AI-based IntelliCode improvements, Hot Reload capabilities for .NET and C++ projects, Web Live Preview, and cross-platform testing on Linux, and improvements to features like the debugger and .NET language service. You can learn more in the Visual Studio 2022 release notes and documentation.

As for .NET 6, this unified platform release (across browser, cloud, desktop, IoT, and mobile) is a long-term support (LTS) release with three years of support. It provides major performance gains, support for C# 10.0, Visual Basic improvements for Windows Forms (which is itself 20 years old), Hot Reload compatibility, and more.

.NET 6 is supported with Visual Studio 2022 and Visual Studio 2022 for Mac. You can download Visual Studio 2022 from the Visual Studio website.

And if you’re interested in these releases, there is a live stream launch event happening as I publish this. And the three-day .NET Conf 2021 starts tomorrow for even more information.

Tagged with .NET 6, Visual Studio 2022