Microsoft has unveiled Visual Studio 2022 17.8 Preview 1, which introduces a number of improvements for day-to-day tasks, after having just released Visual Studio 2022 17.7, which also brings enhancements to streamline coding.

Productivity enhancements in Visual Studio 2022 17.8 Preview 1 include the ability to add reviewers to an Azure DevOps or GitHub pull request directly within the IDE, the addition of a summary view in diff and compare views, and case-preserving search and replace across multiple files. The summary view allows developers to see only the changes in the file with a few lines of context. 

Visual Studio 2022 17.8 also extends IntelliTest support for .NET 6 and later and .NET Standard, making it easier to generate unit tests. And it raises the limit on multi-repository support, allowing developers to work with as many as 25 repos at once in a solution. Other improvements in Visual Studio 2022 17.8:

• When developers do a Replace, they can preserve the original casing of each match in code.
• For C++ and game development, Build Insights now is integrated into Visual Studio 2022. Developers can see additional information relating to function generation. The Function view will tell how long a function takes during compilation along with information on the number of ForceInlinees associated.
• For debugging and diagnostics, the .NET Counter tool now is available within the diagnostics window.
• A Razor code action can generate an event handler method.
• A combined template is offered for React TypeScript and ASP.NET.

New productivity features in Visual Studio 2022 17.7, released August 8, include the ability to compare any file in Solution Explorer with other files, and updated parallel stack filtering options to selectively display or hide specific threads or frames. The update also improves All-in-One Search responsiveness and Find in Files search times. The memory consumption of the C# Spell Checker has been reduced, thanks to significant improvements to its Language Server Protocol (LSP).

Other improvements in Visual Studio 2022 17.7:

• For .NET development, the CPU usage tool now offers more detailed information for certain methods and properties. Also, auto-decompilation is offered for external .NET code.
• For C++, developers can observe step-by-step expansion of macros.
• For Linux and embedded development with C++, Visual Studio now makes it easier to get a one-click download of Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Visual Studio 2022 can be downloaded from the project website.