Visual Studio 2022 - 17.12 - Release Notes
visual studioVisual Studio 2022 is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft that allows users to build, debug, and publish code. It can be used to create apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 update focuses on providing developer experiences for working with .NET 9 projects and new AI productivity features, along with continuous improvements all-around.
This is an exciting release for Microsoft and Developers as it marks the release of .Net9, .NET 9 elevates cloud-native and intelligent app development, focusing on productivity enhancements, streamlined deployments, and accelerated AI integration.
We are big fans of GitHub Copilot here at OnlyIan HQ, and Visual Studio 2022 Version 17.12 doesn't disappoint, offering 13 new features:
- Ask GitHub more questions
- Custom instructions for GitHub Copilot
- Model selection in GitHub Copilot Chat
- Enhanced contextual understanding
- Content Exclusion updates
- AI smart variable inspection
- AI-powered IEnumerable Visualizer
- Debug tests with GitHub Copilot
- Fix code with GitHub Copilot 📣
- Better AI completions for C#
- Reference code in GitHub Copilot
- Guided chat in GitHub Copilot
- GitHub Copilot onboarding
Copy files between instances: You can now copy files and folders from Solution Explorer in one instance of Visual Studio to another.
.NET 9
There have been quite a lot of improvements with .NET 9, the main improvement is with the handling of JSON Data, and improved API speeds, Microsoft have acheived this by speeding up the way loops are handled. Microsoft has improved .NET 9 speeds primarily through optimizations in the Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler, enhanced garbage collection (GC), improved native interoperability, and by optimizing common LINQ operations, resulting in faster application execution and reduced memory overhead across various scenarios, including quicker startup times and better performance for complex data processing operations. NET 9 introduces several improvements in terms of building platform-native features with . NET MAUI. In particular, the framework now has access to the Android Asset Packs, improved interop with native libraries, and improved integration between Xcode and Visual Studio Code via the new Xcode Sync dotnet tool.
The speed improvements to NET 9 have been made my reducing the amount of assembler calls the runtime adds to the execution stack, a detailed blog post can be read here, by Stephen Toub - MSFT.
Release History
| Version | Release Date | Description |
| 17.12 | November 12, 2024 | Major quality of life release. |
| 17.12.1 | November 19th, 2024 | Bug Fixes |
| 17.12.2 | November 26th, 2024 | NET 9 - Xcode 16.2 support (9170) |
| 17.12.3 | December 3rd, 2024 | Bug Fixes |
| 17.12.4 | January 14th, 2025 | VS now includes MAUI 8.0.100 (SR10); MAUI 9.0.14 (SR1.4) |
| 17.12.5 | TBC | TBC |
