With the recent announcement of Microsoft’s intent to purchase GitHub, the company continues to send signals to observers that it is trying to do as much as it can to foster a convenient creative space for developers.
On the heels of that GitHub signal to developers, Microsoft has also unveiled its plans for the evolution of its own in-house developer tools, Visual Studio.
On the company’s Visual Studio Blog, director of program management for Visual Studio, John Mont, announced the next iteration of the developer software, simply called Visual Studio 19 and what users can expect with the next release.
Now, it’s time to start to look at what comes next.
The short answer is Visual Studio 2019
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, and we’re now in the early planning phase of Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio for Mac. We remain committed to making Visual Studio faster, more reliable, more productive for individuals and teams, easier to use, and easier to get started with. 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.
Our goal with this next release is to make it a simple, easy upgrade for everyone – for example, Visual Studio 2019 previews will install side by side with Visual Studio 2017 and won’t require a major operating system upgrade.
While there are new Visual Studio 19 previews scheduled in immediate future, Mont encourages interested parties to subscribe to the Visual Studio 2017 preview to be among the first to get downloadable bits when they become available. As of now, the Visual Studio team will continue to publish the roadmap online for developers as they work with open source repositories.
