Microsoft has released a significant update for Visual Studio 2022, bringing the IDE to version 17.5. This update improves multiple aspects of the experience, including a new Accessibility Checker feature and improved support for Arm64 devices.

Indeed, the Accessibility Checker is one of the many highlights of this release. This is a tool that can detect potential accessibility issues in XAML-based desktop apps, and it supports WPF, WinForms, WinUI, and MAUI, so you can use it with a lot of projects. Visual Studio will not only highlight the problems but also explain what you can do to fix them. On the topic of suggestions, Visual Studio 2022 17.5 now also supports AI-powered "intent-based" suggestions, which means it can automatically suggest edits to your code based on other edits you've made in other parts of the project.

Screenshot of the Accessibility Checker in Visual Studio

Another notable improved is a native Clang Arm64 toolset for LLVM, which enables native compilation on Arm64 devices, resulting in faster performance. This follows the official debut of native Arm64 support with version 17.4. On the topic of performance improvements, Microsoft also says you can expect much faster build times for .NET apps by making it so that only projects that received updates are built, while unchanged projects are skipped. Additionally, Microsoft improved the performance of the debugger, specifically the response times of the threads window, which Microsoft says should be twice as fast now.

There are a lot more improvements across the board, some related to Azure, Blazor, and more. Some quality-of-life improvements also include a new update setting, which lets you update Visual Studio automatically when you close it, making it so that updates are installed right away when you're not using it. On more of a side note, Microsoft has also made Visual Studio available through the Windows Package Manager (winget), so you can now install it that way.

Over on macOS, there are a few other improvements, starting with a new Git Branch Selector in the status bar so you can easily see what brand you're working on and open your Git changes window. There's also a new Hot Exit feature, which lets you close Visual Studio instantly even if you have unsaved changes. All the changes you make to your project are now stored as unsaved changes when you close Visual Studio, so you don't have to deal with confirmation prompts.

Along with the new version of Visual Studio, Microsoft also announced and released the first preview of .NET 8, along with matching updates for ASP.NET Core and EF Core. The new version includes improved support for Native AOT capabilities, allowing for reduced memory footprint and faster startup times for your apps. A lot of other improvements are also included, with some specifically focusing on Arm64 devices.

You can download Visual Studio for Windows here, while Visual Studio for Mac is available here. If you want to try the latest .NET preview, you can download .NET 8 here.


Source: Microsoft (1, 2, 3)