Visual Studio 2022

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Visual Studio 2022 Support!

Hello! We have very good news today. We just released Visual Assist 2021.5 and it has our official support for the Visual Studio 2022 release.

This blog could be as short as that sentence, but I’d like to write a bit more about our support and how we got here. Meanwhile I recommend if you’re using VS2022 you download and install 2021.5 now!

Background

Historically it’s been very important to us to release support for new versions of Visual Studio very quickly, and if you’ve read our blog posts this year about VS2022, you’ll have read me say that before. While many customers stay on older versions for some time, we have a lot of people who upgrade immediately, so we’ve always put a lot of emphasis on being able to ship a version of Visual Assist supporting new versions of Visual Studio quickly. While I’ve been product manager here for almost three years, this is the first new major version of Visual Studio during that time, and I and the whole team were keen to continue that speedy-support tradition.

We started work supporting VS2022 early, and we’ve shared our progress over this past nine months about the work we’ve been doing to support VS2022, with beta support for Previews 3, skipping 4 due to a breaking bug, and 5, 6, and 7/RC. We released Visual Assist 2021.4 shortly before Visual Studio 2022 was released, and many of you are using it with VS2022 already.

Visual Studio 2022 was a large change from previous versions. Not only did it change to 64-bit, but there are many new APIs as well, and these APIs change the interaction model from synchronous to asynchronous interaction. This is a pattern Visual Studio has been following for several years (and we encourage it—it really helps the IDE) but as you may know migrating from any sync to async model is rarely trivial. Usually, the majority of the work for each new Visual Studio release is around adapting to API changes, and that was the case here too. In fact, the most major bug we saw using Visual Assist (abbreviated VAX) 2021.4 with VS2022 and which was one of the issues we fixed for today’s official support, an issue where the code suggestions window sometimes did not show in the right place, was related to the move to one specific async API.

Timeline

  • We released Visual Assist 2021.4 on October 29.
  • Visual Studio 2022 was released on November 8, nine days later.
  • VAX 2021.4 overall worked pretty well with the final VS2022 build
    • But both we and some customers found a few more issues, and we’ve spent the past two weeks since VS’s release resolving them
  • VAX 2021.5 with official support for Visual Studio 2022 was released on Nov 22!

Official Support for VS2022

Yesterday afternoon US time we posted Visual Assist 2021.5 on our website. We have a rolling release mechanism and in about a week you should see in-IDE notifications about the new release, followed a couple of weeks later with the new version being available in the Visual Studio Marketplace. However you can directly download and install it now.

We’ve been working on VS2022 for something like nine months now and we’re really happy to have Visual Assist publicly available with Visual Studio 2022 support. We hope it is useful to you!

A note of thanks: VS2022 was a large change from previous versions, and Microsoft has been very open and helpful. We’re very grateful to them for their communications with us, the beta program, and their assistance while we’ve added support. Thank you!

I want to note as well that though as PM I get to write these posts, I really do very little, and all the credit for this release and VS2022 support goes to our amazing team. Thank you!

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Visual Assist 2021.4 is released! (And notes on Visual Studio 2022)

We are pleased to have just released Visual Assist 2021.4. VAX uses a rolling release mechanism, so it will be a couple of weeks until VAX notifies you in-product and a couple more before it’s available on the Visual Studio store, but you can download Visual Assist 2021.4 today from our website.

VAX 2021.4 is a quality-focused release. Our last release, 2021.3, was mostly focused on supporting the upcoming Visual Studio 2022 Previews. That early work on support for VS2022 means that when the official release of VS2022 is out, we’ll be able to ship official support very fast. (More on this below.)

However, not everyone upgrades to a new Visual Studio release immediately — in fact many people have very good reasons for staying on older versions for quite some time! — and we want to focus on providing what all our customers across many versions need. (We still support VS 2005!) That’s the focus for this version. This release, as a quality release, focuses on fixing bugs and adding changes for everyone.

Our release notes contain full info, but some notable changes include support for the new External Include Directories property in Visual Studio, and updating the Code Inspection engine to LLVM/Clang version 12.0.1. There are a plethora of bug fixes as well. All up we feel this release is a solid update for you no matter which version of Visual Studio, and for all ways that you use Visual Assist.

Visual Studio 2022

Swiftly supporting new versions of Visual Studio is very important to us, because we understand it’s important to many of you, and we hope you’ve enjoyed seeing VAX working in many of the Visual Studio 2022 Previews. We expect VS2022 to be released very soon. In fact, as we were preparing this release, Previews 5, 6 and 7 came out, the pace increasing so fast that our installer only mentions support for Preview 6, but we do in fact support Preview 7 as well. At the same time we’ve seen significant stability improvements with each newer preview.

We don’t want to delay our release schedule to wait until VS2022 is shipped, especially because this release is focused on what customers using other versions need, which is why we’re releasing now. But since VS2022 will be released so soon, and since we are very ready for that to happen, you can expect a swift mini-update from us adding official support.

In other words:

  • VAX 2021.4 supports Visual Studio 2022 Previews 5 and 6 (with issues leading to hangs), and 7/RC3 (fully)
  • We’re eagerly waiting for VS2022 to be released, and we’ll add official support for it very quickly when it’s out
Visual Assist 2021.4 running in Visual Studio 2022 Preview 7 (Release Candidate 3)
Visual Assist 2021.4 running in Visual Studio 2022 Preview 7 (Release Candidate 3)

We recommend you install Visual Assist 2021.4 now, and we look forward to shipping official support for Visual Studio 2022 very soon.

Visual Assist support for Visual Studio 2022 Previews!
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Visual Assist support for Visual Studio 2022 Previews!

There’s a lot of interest in the developer community about the new version of Visual Studio, which is in preview currently. This week we released Visual Assist 2021.3 (build 2420), and Visual Assist includes beta support for the Visual Studio 2022 Previews.

VAssistX menu open in the Visual Studio 2022 Extensions menu
Visual Assist 2021.3 running inside Visual Studio 2022 Preview 3

Visual Studio Preview

Visual Studio (VS) 2022’s main change—and it’s a significant one—is that it will become a 64-bit process. Since Visual Assist (VA or VAX) runs as a plugin, in-process, we needed to build a 64-bit version of our plugin DLL. Those who have upgraded 32-bit code to 64-bit code before know that, even in well-architected code, it takes some work even just to review code to ensure it is correct. In addition, the new version adds and modifies a number of APIs we rely on to interact with the IDE. Adapting to those was the most significant change for us.

We’ve tested fully against VS 2022 Preview 2, and in fact the installer says ‘Preview 2’. There are some known regressions:

  • VA Quick Info not appearing when triggered by keyboard in VS 2022 [case: 146063]
  • Source Links example plugin does not load in VS 2022 [case: 146012]
  • Changing from Cascadia to another font for italicized system symbols requires restart in VS 2022 [case: 145979]
  • plus a few others.

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 3 was released two days ago—overlapping timing with our release—and our regression tests are showing some failures. Currently we believe those are because of changed behaviour in a Visual Studio API which we use when verifying in-IDE behaviour (ie not an issue in VAX itself), but it is always possible that once that is resolved further test failures will need to be resolved. However, we believe the current build is well worth trying out on Preview 3 as well.

Performance

Many of our customers strain the Visual Studio IDE, with many plugins and SDKs installed. Both to help them, and because we believe it’s part of being a good member of the Visual Studio ecosystem where our plugin sits alongside others, last November we greatly reduced the in-process memory usage largely through (spoiler: the full blog is worth reading) use of memory-mapped files.

Now that Visual Studio 2022 is a 64-bit process, that work is not necessary for VS2022. For older versions of Visual Studio, those techniques are still used, so if you’re using VS 2019 or even VS 2005 with Visual Assist 2021.3, you’ll still benefit from the lighter memory impact within the IDE.

When we did that work, we also focused on performance to ensure that the changes to memory access had either zero or a positive impact. The blog notes that for heavy usage, we had equal performance; for small projects, VAX actually was a bit faster. Despite no longer needing the memory usage code we added, VS 2022 benefits from that performance work as well, plus some more work we’ve done while adding support. Since it’s a beta build, and Visual Studio itself is in preview, we do not have hard numbers. But a rough guideline is that an operation like Find References that previously may have taken (say) two minutes will now take about one minute twenty seconds, or about two thirds the time.

Overall

It’s historically been very important to us to have swift support for new versions of Visual Studio, and this work is our foundation for quickly officially supporting Visual Studio 2022 when it is officially released. While the main focus of this release was VS 2022 support, there are other changes as well in 2021.3, which we’ll document in the What’s New. We know we have many customers using older versions of Visual Studio, and as well as those improvements today you can look forward to further improvements focusing on other, non-VS areas as we switch back to a more normal focus in our next release.

We’re really happy to be able to ship beta support for the Visual Studio 2022 previews, and providing an even faster Visual Assist is a happy bonus. We’ll continue to work and look forward to shipping full support when Visual Studio publishes its final release.

Visual Assist 2021.3 is available for download on our website now, and will be on the Visual Studio Marketplace in a few days. Enjoy!