After a long year, I got time to share some of the knowledge, just because last week Visual Studio 2020 Preview is released for developers. I’m using visual studio 2019 yet, but when I look into the preview am convinced to move on for 2020 version.
Developers don’t even care about their IDE & Code Editors, but being a software engineer I have to focus on the main purpose of tools. It does not only bring a lot of ease to developers but also quick integration for other tools which can enhance outcomes in development. Visual studio 2019 get popular due to .NET Core dependency over that, not fully dependent but partially. Because VS 2019 comes with built-in .NET core packages.
Up-to .NET core 2 you can work with VS 2017 but for .NET Core 3, you must have to get VS 2019.
Eventually, I was doing the practice of .NET MVC then just .NET Core features & VS 2019 support released, and I switched from 2017 VS to 2019 VS.
Due to busy schedule am not spent much time over writing because am busy in writing codes. This is just a simple overview which I can give to build-up your interest over new technology and adopting for better work experience.
Note: Visual Studio 2020 Preview is released on 5 August 2020.
What’s new in Visual Studio 2020?
- Enhanced Git Productivity
- C++ compiler improved
- Improved Razor processing
- .NET Refactored
- XAML Enhancements
- VS IDE bug fixing
I think this is a lot for Preview 1. Maybe it’s look-alike useless updates but when you dig into the titles you will get the features which can change your development lifestyle. The biggest part of this preview is based on only Git usage. As we know Microsoft own GitHub so they focus over git repository usage and adding new features to promote their new product.
Git Usage
Now you can manage your git repository from just sidebar menu of visual studio (what’s new?), this is built-in now. Before you have to add extensions to integrate git. In one click you can initialize your git repository and manage. You can publish these created repositories to Azure & GitHub, or either sync between them.
You can easily explore your GitHub & azure repository as you explore azure services from VS. Such as you wanna clone any repository, so open your side menu and search to clone in one click.
Browse the list of git commands from the same solution explorer. When you clone any repository, you will get advanced progress modal which you can process in the background also.
C++ Compiler
Before VS does not allow you to use lambda expression in specifiers. Thus VS c++ compiler is improved and refactored so you can use lambda expression with decltype or any other specifiers. Like you can see in below code.
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void f(int i) { auto lambda = [=]{ return i; }; // captures i static_assert(sizeof(L) == sizeof([=]{ return i; })); // Error, i was not captured? } |
Improved Razor processing
This is common phenomena from a long time in Visual Studio that if you select any variable or method and press F12, it will redirect you from actual code to definition code. But for Razor, it was not available before. Like helper classes of Razor and built-in razor, methods are not accessible for definition.
Now we can also inspect them and read their implementation along with the definition (including the closed file which is not accessible before).
Razor editing and writing capabilities are also improved along with refactoring of backend processing. Now we can use the razor in large scale projects without any issue of its processing and making page loading slow.
To enable this feature you just have to:
- Open tools > options > environment > preview features
- Then select Razor Editor
