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Live Share, IntelliCode Mark Release of Visual Studio 2019

• By David Ramel
• April 3, 2019

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2019 to general availability, marking the first major udate to its flagship IDE in two years with a day-long "launch event" that reached around the globe.

In launching Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 2019 for Mac yesterday (April 2), Microsoft highlighted the general availability of the collaborative Live Share functionality, along with the option to use AI-driven IntelliCode to smarten up the code-completion functionality of IntelliSense, and much more.

"As we've shared earlier, Visual Studio 2019 improves on Visual Studio 2017 in a few areas," exec John Montgomery said in an announcement post. "It helps you get into your code more quickly by making it simpler to clone a Git repo or to open an existing project or folder. It also introduces improvements to the template selection screen to make it easier to start a new project."

Microsoft summarized the capabilities of the release in three main categories:

• Productive: One-click code cleanup. Search in debug windows. Integrated pull requests.
• Modern: .NET Core 3 Preview support. Cross-platform C++. Docker and Kubernetes support.
• Innovative: AI-powered code completion. Real-time coding collaboration. Production debugging.

The real-time coding collaboration introduced with Live Share advances the IDE into the modern world of software development.

"If you haven't heard of Live Share, it's a tool that enables real-time collaborative development with your teammates from the comfort of your own tools, said Jon Chu, program manager, in his own post. "You're able to share your code, and collaboratively edit and debug, without needing to clone repos or set up environments. It's easy to get started with Live Share."

Another much-anticipated feature is IntelliCode, which uses artificial intelligence technology to improve upon IntelliSense. IntelliCode is available as an extension that "augments existing developer workflows with machine-learning services that provide an understanding of code and its context."

"IntelliCode saves time by putting what you're most likely to use at the top of your completion list," its site says. "IntelliCode's recommendations are based on 2,000 high-quality open source projects on GitHub -- each with over 100 stars -- so it's trained on best practices. When combined with the context of your code, the completion list is tailored to promote those practices."

Microsoft provided details on Visual Studio for Mac in a blog post. In the mobile development arena, Microsoft announced what's new for Xamarin developers in VS 2019.

For more details on the VS 2019 launch, see this article on our sister site, Visual Studio Magazine.