It's around two months when Microsoft first announced Visual Studio 2022 and said that the devenv.exe process will now come as 64-bit. Now, the company announced that the Visual Studio 2022 Preview is now available for the developers to test the software ahead of public release this summer.
If you are excited about the release of Visual Studio 2022, you can download the first preview build right now. For more information on Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1, its features, and download links continue reading this post further.
What's new and improved in Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1
The big news is this: "Microsoft Visual Studio is now 64-bit". That means that Visual Studio 2022 will no longer be limited to ~4GB of memory in the main devenv.exe process, and allow you to build the most complex solutions without running out of memory.
The .NET 6 SDK (Preview) is part of the Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1 installation. So, you can start making your applications and games compatible with .NET 6. Microsoft said that this release has basic support for .NET MAUI projects. Temporarily you have to install the .NET MAUI workload separately from .NET 6.
If you are using IntelliCode, it now auto-completes the whole line.
The current WPF XAML Designer for .NET Framework is replaced with a new WPF XAML Designer for .NET Framework, based on the same architecture used for the WPF XAML Designer for .NET (.NET Core).
If you are using Web Tools, the Publish summary page now has actions to start/stop remote debugging and profiling under the '...' menu on the top right corner of the 'Hosting' section. The Connected Services page now has an action to launch Storage Explorer. The "ASP.NET Core Empty" template that comes with .NET 6 is using the new 'minimal APIs' paradigm.
Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1
As the name suggests, Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1 is still under active development. You can not build and deploy any applications or games with the preview build. But, if you want to try Visual Studio 2022 to learn its features and make your applications ready for the forthcoming public release, you can download it from here.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 comes in three editions: Visual Studio Community 2022, Visual Studio Professional 2022, and Visual Studio Enterprise 2022. Here are direct links to download Visual Studio 2022 Preview builds on your test environment. Make sure to read the System Requirements for Visual Studio 2022 before starting the download.