Microsoft serves first taste of Visual Studio 2019

Microsoft serves first taste of Visual Studio 2019

Microsoft has previewed Visual Studio 2019 and .NET Core 3.0 with a raft of changes and announced the open-sourcing of its Desktop Frameworks.

Along with the usual drive to speed and streamline the developer IDE “experience”, this latest update to the Visual Studio line will see Microsoft’s Visual Studio Live Share – announced a year ago for real-time collaboration – installed by default.

The goal of LiveShare is to permit team collaboration on the same code base in Visual Studio without needing to synchronise code or configure tools, settings or environments.

There’s a new pull-request system. This lets you run, review and debug pull requests without leaving the IDE. The system today supports Azure Repos but will be expanded to GitHub.

IntelliCode, introduced by Microsoft in May, has been extended from C# to work with C++ and XAML. This IntelliSense for the AI generation will recommend APIs as you type based on the context of your code. Recommendations come thanks to a Machine-Learning model that’s been trained on thousands of public code bases and that uses 2,000 GitHub repos.

Microsoft has also released a preview of .NET Core 3.0. The update brings WPF and Windows Forms frameworks and Fluent styling from the Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI).

Finally, open source has come to the core. Microsoft’s WPF, Windows Forms and WinUI have been opened up, meaning Microsoft will now accept community contributions for these core desktop frameworks. The WPF and Windows Forms projects will live under the .NET Foundation, whose membership has been expanded to include Pivotal, Progress Telerik and Insight.

The announcements were made at Microsoft’s Connect() 2018 conference.