Visual Studio is one of the most popular integrated development environments (IDEs) around, with support for many different programming languages. The latest available version is Visual Studio 2022 version 17.0.3, but Microsoft is getting closer to the release of 17.1 with a new preview build.

Microsoft said in a blog post, "We’ve continued to iterate on the themes of the Visual Studio 2022 release and have enhanced existing features, brought new productivity improvements, and made it easier for you to make Visual Studio your own. Performance work is never done and we strive to do better every release. In 17.1, we’ve optimized Find All reference searches in C++ projects with up to a 22% improvement."

VIsual Studio window with a list of Git commits
Checking out a specific commit

The 17.1 update includes new features when working in Git code repositories, such as enhanced detached head support, the ability to compare the current branch to other branches, quickly reviewing pull requests, and checking out commits of any remote branch. When you create a new branch in one repository, there's also a new option to create the same branch across other repositories. With any luck, you won't have to reach for the command line quite as often in Visual Studio 7.1, at least when it comes to working with projects in Git.

Visual Studio 7.1 also has a few new features for saving files. You can now automatically run a Code Cleanup profile every time you save a file, available from Tools > Options > Text Editor > "Run Code Cleanup profile on Save". There's also a new feature for automatically saving your file when you switch to a different application on your computer. Finally, there are some language-specific improvements for .NET and C++, as well as a new option to set custom tab colors based on the project and file extension, which should help organization when working with multiple projects in the same window.

You can download Visual Studio Code 2022 17.1 Preview 2 from Microsoft's website. It's not clear when the final 17.1 release will be available.