News

Microsoft Unveils Visual Studio 2019 Plans

• By David Ramel
• June 6, 2018

John Montgomery, director of Program Management for Visual Studio, for the first time published an official announcement of the next edition of the company's flagship IDE, Visual Studio 2019.

"We're now in the early planning phase of Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio for Mac," he said. While details are naturally scant at this point, Montgomery apparently took to the blogosphere to announce VS 2019 plans before developers got wind of it in the company's GitHub work.

"Because the Developer Tools teams (especially .NET and Roslyn) do so much work in GitHub, you'll start to see check-ins that indicate that we're laying the foundation for Visual Studio 2019," he said.

The team will try to keep the upgrade as simple as possible, letting developers install VS 2019 previews and VS 2017 side by side on the same machine.

"As for timing of the next release, we'll say more in the coming months, but be assured we want to deliver Visual Studio 2019 quickly and iteratively," Montgomery said. "We've learned a lot from the cadence we've used with Visual Studio 2017, and one of the biggest things we have learned is that we can do a lot of good work if we focus on continually delivering and listening to your feedback."

That Visual Studio 2017 cadence generated previews and point releases at an almost dizzying pace, resulting in seven updates since VS 2017 went to general availability in March 2017.

No concrete work has been done on the next version -- or, as Montgomery said, "there are no bits to preview yet" -- but eager Visual Studio developers can be among the first to know when they arrive is to keep track of the Visual Studio Blog and subscribe to the Visual Studio 2017 Preview.

There are also no mentions of VS 2019 in the Visual Studio Roadmap, but Montgomery previewed some basic functionality coming up:

Expect more and better refactorings, better navigation, more capabilities in the debugger, faster solution load, and faster builds. But also expect us to continue to explore how connected capabilities like Live Share can enable developers to collaborate in real time from across the world and how we can make cloud scenarios like working with online source repositories more seamless. Expect us to push the boundaries of individual and team productivity with capabilities like IntelliCode, where Visual Studio can use Azure to train and deliver AI-powered assistance into the IDE.

That individual and team productivity is also certain to involve more GitHub integration and functionality. Developers have had mixed -- and sometimes vehement -- reactions to this week's news that Microsoft will acquire GitHub. As far as their views on the upcoming VS 2019, the news just broke shortly before this writing, so we'll be back with comments and feedback as word gets around and reactions are published. There are likely to be plenty of opinions on what the next edition of the IDE should include and exclude.