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The second preview of Visual Studio 2019 is now available for download. This release contains a number of improvements and additions to the core experience and different development areas, many of which are a result of your direct feedback. As always, you can check out the release notes for more details or read on for the highlights.
Core IDE experience
Visual Studio 2019 will automatically download updates in the background while your computer is idle. This means you can continue using Visual Studio 2019 until it’s time to install. And, you will only need to wait for the actual installation of the update. The default will be set to “Download all, then install”, and you can modify this by going to Tools > Options > Environment > Product Updates.
In Preview 1, we introduced a new Per-Monitor Awareness (PMA) preview feature that is now enabled by default for users that meet the system requirements of .NET Framework 4.8 and Windows 10 April 2018 Update. Alongside the core IDE, multiple tool windows such as Toolbox, Breakpoints, Watch, Locals, Autos, and Call Stack should now render sharply across monitors with different display and scale configurations.
Search capabilities have improved in two places: the start window and inside the IDE. In the start window, you can now search for project templates by language, platform, and tags via the search box. Preview 2 introduces filters for menus, components, and templates during search in the IDE, as well as the capability to create and add new projects and items directly from the search box.
Based on your feedback, the new blue theme in Visual Studio 2019 has been updated by dialing down luminosity and increasing contrast. The draggable region has been improved as well by making the toolbar region also draggable. As a result, dragging the Visual Studio 2019 window should now be more natural.
The document health feature that was introduced with Preview 1 has been given a visual upgrade in Preview 2. Now, at a glance, you can see how many errors or warnings your document has, and clicking the control will bring up the error list. Code cleanup, which was introduced in Preview 1, has also been given its own control to quickly access the code cleanup features.
C++ development
C++ developers will notice quite a few improvements in this release. Check out the release notes for the full list, but here are some of the highlights:
- You now have access to a fresh version of the MSVC compiler and to libraries that:
- Bring you guaranteed binary compatibility with Visual Studio 2017 MSVC toolset and runtime
- Add initial support for C++ 20 standards (specifically the “spaceship” operator i.e. <=> under /std:latest),
- Enable OpenMP 4 SIMD vectorization as well as many codegen improvements for better runtime performance and build throughput, including a new compiler switch -Ob3 that provides more aggressive inlining
- Provide new Code Analysis checks including the new Lifetime profile checker.
- CMake integration now enables you to:
- Detect and enable Vcpkg toolchains automatically for CMake projects
- Take advantage of Just My Code debugging and Code Analysis editor integration in CMake projects
Plus, you can try out the latest C++ productivity improvements, including the newly-enhanced C++ Template IntelliSense, NULL->nullptr refactoring, quick fixes for missing #include and using namespace declaration, missing semicolons, and more.
C# development
Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 adds a couple more new C# 8.0 language features on top of the ones that shipped in Preview 1 (Take C# 8.0 for a spin). Most notably, C# 8.0 pattern matching now allows recursive patterns, which can dig into the structure of an object, and switch expressions, which are a lightweight expression version of switch statements. To learn more, check out Do more with patterns in C# 8.0 on the .NET Blog.
F# development
A preview of the F# 4.6 language is now available in Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2. You can learn more about the language changes in the F# 4.6 Preview blog post. Additionally, we’ve revamped how the F# language service is initialized by Roslyn, which should result in a consistently faster solution load time for larger solutions.
.NET development
Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 brings a range of new refactoring and codefix capabilities, such as sync namespace and folder name, pull members up, invert conditional expressions/logical operations, and many more. We’re also gradually rolling out new classification colors which are similar to Visual Studio Code. You can control these via Tools > Options > Environment > Preview Features.
Starting with this release, we are making project files for .NET SDK-style projects a first-class file type in Visual Studio and are supporting things like double-clicking a project node to open the project file and finding a project by name with Go To All (Ctrl + T). Additionally, .NET SDK-style projects will now use the new Integrated Console experience for F5 and Ctrl + F5 on console apps.
Code cleanup also now enables you to save collections of fixers as a profile. Now, if you wanted to apply a small set of targeted fixers frequently while you code and have another more comprehensive set of fixers to apply before preparing for a code review, you can configure profiles to address these different tasks.
Python development
You can now switch between different Python interpreters using the new Python Environments toolbar when editing Python files or working with projects or Open Folder workspaces. Miniconda is available as an optional component during installation so you don’t have to separately install it to create conda environments. Additionally, you can now create Visual Studio Live Share sessions for collaboration on Python code. Check out the Python in Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 blog post for more details.
Web and container development
If you’re developing with Node.js, you will find JavaScript debugging support for unit tests in this release. If ASP.NET is more your style, you will find that when publishing your application to Azure App Service, you can associate Azure Store and Azure SQL resources with your app as dependencies.
If you’re using containers, Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 now supports debugging ASP.NET Core applications that use Alpine as a base image. There’s also support for the latest ASP.NET and .NET Core images.
Visual Studio Kubernetes Tools are now integrated in the Azure development workload for easy installation. This will add the Container Application for the Kubernetes project template to Visual Studio, which will automatically create a Dockerfile and Helm chart that you can use. This also enables you to add support for Kubernetes to an existing ASP.NET Core application by right-clicking the project and selecting Add > Container Orchestrator Support. After adding Kubernetes support, you can build, run, and debug your application in a live Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster with Azure Dev Spaces.
Mobile .NET development
For .NET developers using Xamarin to build mobile apps, Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 has improved build performance if you use Xamarin.Android 9.1.1 or higher. Xamarin.Android now also supports the latest Android dex compiler (d8) and code shrinker (r8). The Android designer now natively supports Android Pie (9.0) and will show you improved status when loading. You can also use Go-To-Definition (Ctrl + Click) on resource URLs to navigate to the file or line where they are defined.
A new property panel has been added for Xamarin.Forms developers, enabling you to edit common attributes for controls. The Xamarin.Forms templates now use the latest Xamarin.Forms 4.0 release and include a new Xamarin.Forms Shell app that aims to reduce the complexity of a multi-platform app solution.
Last, but not least, load performance for new projects has been improved dramatically, showing performance gains of up to 50% in certain cases. When building apps, you can now also see more detailed build progress information by clicking the background tasks icon in the bottom left of the IDE.
Get started; share feedback
You can download Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 here or update using the Visual Studio Installer. If you want to give it a spin without installing it, check out the Visual Studio images on Azure. Let us know of any issues you run into by using the Report a Problem tool in Visual Studio. You can also head over to the Visual Studio Developer Community to track your issues, suggest a feature, ask questions, and find answers from others. We use your feedback to continue to improve Visual Studio 2019, so thank you again on behalf of our entire team.
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Angel Zhou Program Manager, Visual Studio
Angel Zhou is a program manager on the Visual Studio release engineering team, which is responsible for making Visual Studio releases available to our customers around the world. |
I’m interested in the “Do more with patterns in C# 8” but this link is dead: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2019/01/24/do-more-with-patterns-in-c-8-0/
Hi whoIsKevinRich, the blog post will go live in a little while, can you check back in an hour or two?
It’s live now.
Excited to see you guys are finally adding better syntax colorization for C#. It’s nuts that Visual Studio has for so long had some of the worst syntax colorization out of any modern IDE.
Also happy to see more quick fixes going into the product. I think you should make a team just devoted to creating these- VS is still so far behind what ReSharper offers in this regard.
Are you guys ever going to address the resetting keybindings bug that’s been present for several versions? It’s absolute infuriating, and it wastes so much time. VS is supposed to roam your keybindings between machines, and instead it constantly destroys them.
Please, do not remove the classic colorization. I dont like the “modern” one that is like VS Code. Please, do not force us to use this new colorization. I like the older classic one. Thanks!
Couldn’t agree more, the new colour scheme is a pain to work with (dark mode), for example .. is now painfully blended. To my eyes (not the best) everything just starts blending together without the contrast there used to be.
Please give us an option to keep using the old theme.
I agree. I kinda like the darker themes, and am currently using a dark theme for vscode and vstudio but I find when my eyes are getting tired, the white theme ends up easier to read… I think the irony is because paper is white background/black text.
Maybe an OLED screen would change that… lol
I think the best option is to embed SemanticColorized functionality into visual studio – to add ability to customize each color and style for each semantic construction (method, properties, static methods, e.t.c.)
And big please add normal search to fonts, and to settings in common like it works in any other modern app (searches by text presented in tab and colorize each match)
Better? Doubt so. The default Blue theme leads to C# method calls being highlighted in Bold Red. Now that’s a lot of eye strain. There is no way people can be used to it on everyday basis.
From what I can tell, overall 2019 preview 2 looks like a regression from UI standpoint. Hope everything will be rectified before the release.
I suggest to add support for Apache Cordova for the next preview. This is a still very used framework.
As detailed in the “Project migration and upgrade reference for Visual Studio 2019 Preview” doc [1], support for Apache Cordova was removed in Visual Studio 2019 Preview. You can use the Cordova Tools for Visual Studio Code extension (which provides support for the latest version of Cordova) or continue using Visual Studio 2017.
[1] https://aka.ms/vs2019-projmigration
Is there any ETA or roadmap when XAML Designer for .NET Core 3.0 will be released? I hoped it would manage it into Preview 2 but it looks like it needs more time. It’s currently the only thing that holds me back from switching to .NET Core 3 (which is absolutely amazing btw. Huge thanks for allowing WPF to use it!)
Hi JKeller4414,
Thanks a lot for reaching out. Don’t worry – we’re working hard on making sure the XAML Designer is ready for .NET Core WPF developers. It will still be some time until it is ready as we need to undergo a fairly large re-architecture to ensure stability (take a look at this post, under the ‘Reliability’ header: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/09/11/a-significant-update-to-the-xaml-designer/)
To help mitigate the impact of not having a designer, we have a sample that may help you: https://github.com/dotnet/samples/tree/master/wpf/HelloWorld-WithLinkedFiles. What this will allow you to do is to build a .NET Framework and .NET Core WPF application simultaneously with the exact same set of files. This allows you to use the traditional .NET Framework tooling you’re used to (including the designer), while still being able to produce a .NET Core output.
What sort of features in the XAML Designer do you most depend on to be productive? We’d love to chat with you more about your XAML Designer usage to ensure the features you need the most are prioritized appropriately. If you’d like to chat, please let me know at dajaco at microsoft dot com.
Sincerely,
Daniel
Hi Daniel,
what I really need is having a live preview of XAML code. Especially when you build a new window or user control it saves a lot of time not having to debug in order to see the layout. For smaller projects I build XAML in .NET Framework and port it to .NET Core later. Thanks for your second link, I’ll check it out.
I have preview 1.1 and the update instructions are incorrect. There is no “Product Updates” within Tools>Options>Environment. Not sure why Microsoft has such a hard time with the simple things, like documentation. Think there might be some English language barrier going on.
The irony of this comment is staggering. Lmao xD
That’s not good! Any chance you could share a pointer to those instructions so we can get that fixed? Thank you!
Really like the product in general. I have updated 3 dev boxes with preview 2 and it works great. Main disappointment is Xamarin Forms designer is still broken except for really basic xaml. Preview 1 would show an unknown error, preview 2 now just shows a black image. This part really needs work. Could you break out the designer into a separate tool? Catch and ignore errors and at least render the controls it can etc?
Hi sfoxover! Thanks for the feedback! The Xamarin.Forms XAML Previewer had a regression in Preview 2 that broke it for most customers. We are shipping the fix in Preview 3. We are working on exactly what you suggested – trying to render regardless of errors, fall back to base types, etc. Improving the XAML Previewer is a main focus for Visual Studio 2019, so keep your eye out for fixes and features over the next few releases. Hopefully you start to find it more usable soon. Thank you again for the comment!
I have never before experienced such a horrible upgrade. I clicked on the yellow flag button to start the upgrade and then the installer started upgrading itself in a loop 10+ times. I tried also to download and run the installer manually. I had to kill it finally uninstall the installer, which also removed all my VS instances. Delete everything, including folders, registry, etc. Reboot and then I finally managed to install it after wasting several hours. Thanks for not testing your installers.
I also experienced the looping installer when I tried to use the Visual Studio Installer.
After 3 loops I gave up and instead started the VS 2019 preview 1 IDE which detected the available update, and letting it update from there was successful for me.
@Roccoor and @David,
thank you for reporting the issue, and we apologize for the inconvenience. In short, this was a publishing mistake.
This issue is also reported at the VS developer community (for details take a look at feedback https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/434144/update-loop.html).
Thanks,
–Selma
@David and @Roccor,
We’re sorry for the trouble you’re having, and we’re working to fix the issue.
Our team just identified a separate issue from the one linked below. We’re working on posting a workaround so people can unblock themselves. We think there is a old, cached copy of the installer that got downloaded in a two-hour window on Wednesday to your machine. That copy is preventing us from identifying a newer one as one we should download for the update. As a result, we keep trying to apply the same version of the installer, and the installer then does its version check, and thinks its out of date to handle updating Preview 2. We need to prevent this from happening again, but we need to unblock you now.
The immediate suggested workaround : delete the %temp%\vs\setup folder.
Please let us know if this works for you – we’re still working on the problem here, and we don’t have a live reproduction of the issue we can debug here.
Again, we’re sorry for the problems this caused you.
Do you have added project types for winforms and wpf .net core projects? I mean patterns when creating new project from VS.
We don’t currently have templates for WPF and Winforms targeting .NET Core in Visual Studio, but we do plan to add them in an upcoming preview! For now, you can create new WPF and WinForms app at the command-line with the .NET Core 3 sdk with the command: dotnet new winforms -o MyWinFormsApp.
You can also check out the samples for Winforms and WPF on GitHub:
https://github.com/dotnet/samples/tree/master/windowsforms
https://github.com/dotnet/samples/tree/master/wpf
Any ETA for .NET Core SDKs to match the VS 2019 Preview 2? Currently I’m using SDK 3.0.100-preview-009812, but that means I can’t use switch expressions from C# 8. Having VS support without command-line support is a major restriction on how useful this is. (As a feature request, I’d generally prefer the VS release to be delayed by a couple of days if that means the SDK can be released at the same time. When I’m doing an update, it’s much more convenient to update everything at the same time than to update VS and then have to watch for the SDK update to be available too.)
This Visual Studio version is awesome. Faster, with more features. Also brings new language features for C# and F#.
Waiting to see more progress on the editor support for the XAML Graphical User Interface editors for WPF, UWP on .NET Core.
Also waiting to see UWP Window, Ribbon, more printing APIs, and having the option to compile a standalone UWP EXE would be very interesting.
Thank for adding the blue theme contrast fixes!!
Can we have the original untouched Blue theme from VS 2017 as well (e.g. called “Classic Blue”)
Thanks for the feedback guys!
@SamSmithnz – The Preview 3 fixes add a tad more contrast so hopefully you like them even better.
@Mike Diack – Was there any particular thing you feel the “Classic Blue” brings to the table that the Dev16 Blue theme is not meeting? We noted the feedback about the new Blue theme being too bright and have an improved theme version coming on Preview 3.
It’s purple and not blue, and the purple color bothers my eyes. The tab color was yellow, but such a low-contrast yellow that it was fine. The orange color tabs now are harsh to my eyes. I’ve used VS for 20 years straight, and with the exception of 2012’s crazy mono-gray scheme that was in the beta, I’ve never had to think or worry about UI colors until now.
Please keep the original blue theme available, maybe called “Blue (classic)”. I really like the original one…even the updated theme in preview 2 still gives me a big headache and eye strain. VS is already a massive amount of GB in size, what’s a few more megabytes to keep a theme that many people like??
Agreed Dean – I greatly prefer the old (VS2013 – VS 2017) Blue theme – can we have it kept (e.g. as Classic Blue)? please – it’s much easier on the eyes than the Preview 1.1 version and even Preview 2 is still hard on the eyes
Thanks for the feedback!
As I mentioned above, we noted the feedback about the new Blue theme being too bright and have an improved theme coming in Preview 3.
@Dean_Jackson & Mike Diack – We would love to hear your thoughts once its released.
Can anyone explain what are the third states of the checkboxes for a preview feature in the Preview Features category?
Hi manuel4y,
The third state indicates that the feature is being A/B tested. You can still enable and disable those features by toggling the checkbox. We will be fixing this experience in the next update and removing the tri-state checkboxes. Sorry for the confusion and thank you for trying out our new features!
When static analysis is run on a CMake project it renames the files like this:
X:\GitHub\Proj\Proj\Sources\Engine\Sources\Application\Preferences.cpp(50): note: This diagnostic occurred in the compiler generated function ‘Application::Preferences::Data::Data(void)’
x:\github\proj\proj\sources\engine\sources\application\preferences.hpp(35) : warning C26495: Variable ‘Application::Preferences::Data::mainWindowMetrics’ is uninitialized. Always initialize a member variable (type.6).
If you open the file by double clicking and then save it. The file name gets de-capitalized.
This is fundamentally wrong! Why do you refuse to fix this? How is that even possible!
Thanks for your feedback. Could you please post an issue on https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com? Please attach a sample project if possible.
Will the WDK Development be supported at any point during the preview?
The WDK is being updated to support Visual Studio 2019 as announced here:
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/b116571d-d5b2-4c1c-a43e-4b57171c8c41/windows-driver-kit-wdk-to-support-visual-studio-2019?forum=wdk
At this time were are working on the last changes needed to complete the work but once the WDK is ready a preview will be posted on the Windows Insider Preview Downloads available here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsinsiderpreviewWDK
How to show the project name in the title bar? How to remove the compact windows that show up menu bar and remove the title bar? There is an option in the Preview 1 to show the normal title bar instead of this engedrous.
@JaviAlvar the option was removed in Preview 2. Having said that, we acknowledge the feedback about removing the solution name from the top and might have more to communicate about this soon.
Is Code Analisys supposed to be supported on CMake projects? Its broken – it doesn’t respect target_compile_features (${PROJECT_NAME}_Base
INTERFACE
# Enable C++17 standard compliance
cxx_std_17
)
which results in compilation errors and failed test.
Like I mentioned in the other blog, this is a relatively new experience for us and we really appreciate you taking the time and providing us with valuable feedback. Please go ahead and post this on https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com and attach your sample project. Thanks!
I just like to report a “strange” behavior after I have installed Preview 2. I had set language on Italian and I had Italian appearing for Toolbar and Main Menu. After preview 2 I have a mix of Italian and English. This is not a problem for me but for sure is a small bug that must be fixed.
Regards.
Occurs the same but with Spanish language mixed with English.
1. Can you please add new classification colors to JavaScript similar to Visual Studio Code?
2. Please don’t remove the JavaScript exection engine for the intellisense.
Could you add a warning to the .net 4.8 early access features paragraph stating that this issue:
https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet-framework-early-access/issues/50
could start to appear (at least it did on my machine…) – I’ll have to uninstall 4.8 early access…
When I’m doing my code cleanups, I like to remove unused usings, and then sort them. But it takes all sorts to write cleaned code.
I wonder if you might be able to clarify your comment a bit. In Preview 2, there are fixers specifically for sorting usings and removing unused using statements. Have you tried the Code Cleanup feature? If you’re looking for additional fixers, I would suggest clicking the small arrow next to the Code Cleanup button and choose “Configure Code Cleanup”. That will give you a dialog with all of the different fixers that are currently available.
How do I setup the code colorizing? I don’t want bold font. Yellow color is ok.
Thank you for trying out the Visual Studio 2019 preview! We are planning to remove the bold in a future preview because we received several comments similar to yours on the bold font. In the mean time, You can remove the bold font by going to Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors with Text Editor selected in the drop down. Under “Display Options” scroll down to Symbol – Static and uncheck the bold check box.
Still can’t open 1/2 dozen Apache Cordova projects in 2019 we have to maintain/tweak. I’m hoping MS isn’t dropping support after I spent years moving people our Cordova people to VS.
As detailed in the “Project migration and upgrade reference for Visual Studio 2019 Preview” doc [1], support for Apache Cordova was removed in Visual Studio 2019 Preview. You can use the Cordova Tools for Visual Studio Code extension (which provides support for the latest version of Cordova) or continue using Visual Studio 2017.
[1] https://aka.ms/vs2019-projmigration
is support for “Edit and Continue” of vb code planned?
Please add an option to use the blue color scheme from Visual Studio 2017. Even the “Extra Contrast” blue scheme is too light. Plus, the orange title bars are distracting as is the blue background for menus and toolbar.
I suggest having the Blue scheme match the colors of the Blue scheme of VS 2017 and add the new scheme as “Light Blue”.
If you are unwilling to do this, at least provide a tool that let’s me waste half a day changing the colors to something tolerable.
@JoeWoodbury – We have noted the feeeback about the new Blue theme being too bright and have an improved theme coming in Preview 3.
Would love to hear back from you once Preview 3 is released.
Will you preserve the original blue theme, maybe call it “Blue (classic)” ? There’s no reason not to. The size of the VS install is already huge, what’s another couple of megabytes to keep a theme many people still like?
Nothing for VB.NET?
Can’t add Windows UWP project when I create a Xamarin.Forms project. Checkboxes are there for Android and iOS, but Windows UWP checkbox was removed from ‘Choose template’ screen(was there in 2017). Still able to add an UWP project after I create Android/iOS only or Android-iOS Xamarin.Form project, but that’s quite an annoyance since there should be a lengthy process of setting up things.
Was the removal intentional? If so, why? Is there any plan to bring it back?
At http://developercommunity.visualstudio.com, if you search for SSDT, you’ll find a lot of pages of problems, and an overwhelming majority are all “triaged”. I submitted numerous ones throughout last year. Almost all of them have no comment from Microsoft. SSDT (SQL object explorer, table designer, etc.) in VS 2017 will frequently hang for a while, or be terribly slow. It’s much worse when using Azure DB.
What’s the word on SSDT for VS 2019? Why have all of these issues at the developer website been left abandoned??
It looks like 2019 Preview 2 completely eliminated the concept of a Start Page. Any way to make Start Window optional or at least non-modal? All those additional clicks and choices are kind of heartbreaking to say the least.
Is there any news that Microsoft can share on when Visual Studio 2019 is intended to be released? Obviously, those can’t be commitments at this time, but an idea of the timescale would help with planning.
In particular, we have a couple of major software releases that need to freeze in August. That means that if VS.2019 isn’t going to be available by the end of June, we can plan accordingly. A “not before” date is almost as useful as a release date, and doesn’t commit Microsoft to nearly so much.