Visual Studio 2019 Updates Summary

April 18, 2019

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On the 2nd of April, Visual Studio 2019 has been presented with all its new features on the official release event. While we streamed the event in its entirety on our website, we understand that not everyone was able to watch it. So, we decided to write this summary for those who didn’t manage to tune in on the event day but still want to learn about Visual Studio’s new and improved functionality.

Install

New features start at the installation process.

Now, you can control how to install Visual Studio updates through the Tools>Options menu – this includes update install mode configuration and ability to specify whether new updates should be downloaded at all.

Start window

Get to your code quickly with the updated start window:

Access recent projects and folders with a single click, with the ability to change the list via the context menu.
Any public or private Git URLs can now be used to open a folder for cloning or checking out code.
Project templates provide code scaffolding to help you with establishing new projects and solutions.
Robust project template management capabilities

Platform

Experience Visual Studio’s modernized look with a new skin, multiple UI improvements and an experimental feature you can turn on to help render parts of Visual Studio as sharply and crisply as possible – no matter what your display’s characteristics are.
Enhanced search capabilities that apply to menus, commands, options and installable components. The search results are now displayed dynamically along with additional information such as keyboard shortcuts. The new search bar now also accommodates for spelling errors by utilizing fuzzy search algorithms.

With the help of the new Document Health Indicator, you can check the current document’s health information.

Code Cleanup allows you to quickly improve your C# code based on the most common coding suggestions. You can configure Code Cleanup to your preference through the dedicated menu.

Additionally, many other aspects of the familiar Visual Studio work process have been improved to ensure your time with this IDE is as productive as possible.

Performance

There are many performance enhancements and improved accessibility of options in Visual Studio 2019. Let’s look at some of them:

Now, you can open large solutions quickly by choosing to leave related projects unloaded. This can be done with the help of Solution Filter Files.
To improve the solution load speed, you can also disable the restoration of the project’s hierarchy state from the previous session.
The Visual Studio editor will now automatically cancel any long-running nonessential operations when you’re typing, improving the typing performance.

Debugging and Diagnostics

The debugging process has seen a few additions such us a new keyword search feature and a list of options for data formatting integrated into the Watch, Autos and Locals windows, custom and DataSet visualizer support for .NET Core and, for C++ applications running on Windows, a change that allows PDBs to load in a separate 64-bit process, which addresses a lot of crashes.

Other improvements include the updated search UI in the Autos, Locals and Watch windows, an added ability to focus data breakpoints on a specific object’s property even when it’s out of scope and a feature that allows you to apply code style preferences from the command-line.

Extensibility

In Visual Studio 2019, extensions can now only be installed if they are built in V2 or V3 of the vsixmanifest format. This helps to keep all extensions up-to-date with the new extensibility features in Visual Studio 2019.

Multiple improvements have been implemented to help extension authors with developing their extensions, courtesy to the new Microsoft.VisualStudio.SDK package, the improved VSIX Project template and the new Empty VSIX Project template.
You can now also easily check an extension’s distribution model in the Extensions and Updates dialog which will show whether the extensions are free, paid or in a trial version.

Source Control

With the new Pull Requests for Visual Studio extension, you can now review, run, and debug pull requests from Azure Repos right from Visual Studio. Also, Team Explorer’s Git tools now support Git stash, so you can temporarily store changes for future use to work on another tasks.

Programming Languages

Visual Studio 2019 comes with a wide variety of updates that improve your work process with programming languages. The languages that have seen the most additions are C#, C++, F#, Python and JavaScript/TypeScript.

C#: Nullable reference types, Recursive pattern matching, Null-coalescing assignment, static local functions and others
C++: In-editor code analysis warnings, updated implementation of the C++ Lifetime profile checker, the new Template Bar and others
F#: New F# 4.6 with various compiler improvements, enhanced performance for larger solutions and various bug fixes for F# and the F# tools.
Python: New Python Add Environment dialog and Python environment selector toolbar to help you work with environments, and an ability to create Visual Studio Live Share sessions for Python code.
JavaScript/TypeScript: Debug unit tests in Node.js projects and additional support for users who are building TypeScript projects from NuGet and npm packages.

Xamarin development

Xamarin workload has been reduced to half its size from Visual Studio 2017, IntelliCode now supports Xamarin.Forms XAML, and the overall Android build performance and stability is increased. Additionally, Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.Forms productivity has seen a lot of improvements. Some of the highlights are:

You can now create a new Xamarin project much faster. In some cases the reduction in project creation time can reach almost 50%.
A new detailed build progress indicator
An easy-to-use device drop-down menu that allows you to quickly switch between different Android and iOS devices to preview your Xamarin.Forms XAML.
Edit the most common attributes of Xamarin.Forms controls, cells, and layouts in a dedicated properties window
Various Android Emulator improvements
Enhanced Fast Deployment for Xamarin.Android
Improved Xamarin.Android Designer startup speed and performance

Learn more

As the full list of new and updated features in Visual Studio 2019 is quite extensive, we have only mentioned some of the main points of interest. You can find much more information on the official Visual Studio 2019 Release Notes page.

Also, all Devart products can be integrated with Visual Studio 2019. Get more info about each of them by following the respective links: