Microsoft announces fully 64-bit Visual Studio 2022

Developers waiting for news about the next installment of Visual Studio need wait no longer. Microsoft has announced that Visual Studio 2022 will be released later this summer as a public preview.

The company has also revealed that the software is going 64-bit, overcoming the limitations of the 32-bit edition. Microsoft says that the user experience will feel cleaner, more intelligent and action oriented, and that there is an increased cloud focus thanks to improved GitHub integration.

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The switch to 64-bit is an important one, and sees Visual Studio finally catching up with modern computing. While it has long been possible to create 64-bit applications using the development suite, the software has, until now, itself been 32-bit software.

In a post on the Visual Studio blog, Microsoft's Amanda Silver says:

Visual Studio 2022 will be a 64-bit application, no longer limited to ~4gb of memory in the main devenv.exe process. With a 64-bit Visual Studio on Windows, you can open, edit, run, and debug even the biggest and most complex solutions without running out of memory.

While Visual Studio is going 64-bit, this doesn’t change the types or bitness of the applications you build with Visual Studio. Visual Studio will continue to be a great tool for building 32-bit apps.

In terms of other changes to look forward to, there are improved icons, a new font (Cascadia Code), new themes, and better accessibility options. Acknowledging that "personalizing your IDE is as important as picking your desk chair", Microsoft says "it will be easier than ever to make Visual Studio 2022 'just right' for you, from the ability to customize aspects of the IDE to syncing settings across devices for those who maintain multiple dev boxes".

There is also full support for .NET 6, the latest C++20 language features, and integrated support for CMake, Linux, and WSL. The new Hot Reload feature means that coding changes can be seen instantly in running apps while debugging, and there are improved workflow and collaborative features on the horizon.

At the moment, Microsoft is not sharing a precise release date for the 64-bit Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1, but promises that more information is on the way.

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