Microsoft recently announced that they are working on the next version of their signature IDE, Visual Studio which could bring major changes to software development. Reportedly, the tech giant is still in the early planning phase for the next Visual Studio tool suite release, named Visual Studio 2019. The earliest signs of Visual Studio was spotted at GitHub, which is turn about to be acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in company stock.

John Montgomery, director of program management for Visual Studio at Microsoft, after revealing that Visual Studio 2019 is in the works in his blog post, also added that we will be seeing many indicators of the company laying the foundation for the latest Visual Studio suite in Github, where their Developer Tools team spent a lot of time in.

Sneak peek

Visual Studio 2017 was launched in March 2017, which gave rise to a speculation that Visual Studio 2019 would be released in early 2019. However, the company did not reveal anything on the release, but promised to say more in the coming months.

John Montgomery’s blog post still provided a couple of goals for Microsoft’s new Visual Studio release. The company intends to release Visual Studio 2019 faster, with a goal of making the IDE suite more reliable and effective for teams. Visual Studio 2019 is also expected to be easier to use with a short learning curve.

The director also added that we can expect better refactorings and navigation, in addition to a more capable debugger and faster solutions loads and builds. The company would also be exploring the collaboration aspect of the next version, leveraging connected capabilities like Live Share to facilitate real-time collaboration. Cloud scenarios are also expected to be more seamless.

Another intriguing reveal was Microsoft’s willingness to improve team productivity by having Visual Studio utilize Azure to deliver AI-driven assistance to the IDE. Seemingly, other Microsoft technology solutions will also be getting updates to leverage AI, considering the fact that the company seems to be willing to invest in hot trends.

Where they are headed

Because they specifically mentioned Visual Studio’s Live Share feature, we can expect the company to improve the feature. Live Share was announced in November last year, and quickly became popular for its co-authoring capabilities i.e. enabling developers to work together on the same code, much similar to the edit capabilities of a few Office 365 applications. Essentially, the company wants their new Visual Studio to facilitate real-time collaboration effectively.

Aside from its goals for the IDE suite, Microsoft expansion plans also seems promising since their announcement of the GitHub acquisition earlier this month. It was announced by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who also added that GitHub will remain an open platform and developers would still be able to extend it. Developers would be able to use the languages, operating systems, and tools of their choice for their projects, and deploy the code on any cloud and any device.

We will be seeing Microsoft’s IntelliCode, an AI-powered assistance for cloud scenarios in Visual Studio 2019. When introduced during Microsoft’s Build 2018 Developers Conference in May, IntelliCode was applauded. The AI-driven program learns over time and streamlines formatting while suggesting APIs and recommendations to avoid errors. The company is leaning on Azure to train IntelliCode and get it functioning in Visual Studio 2019.

The company also revealed that it took about a whopping 2000 high quality GitHub repositories to train IntelliCode’s machine learning model and ensure that it sticks to best practices.

Conclusion

Although the company didn’t give out any info on the release of the new Visual Studio version, they certainly made it clear that the path they are taking would benefit every Application Management services company leveraging their technologies. Montgomery also teased an announcement in the next few months. Developers who participated in the Visual Studio 2017 Preview would likely be the first to get information on the release of the first beta version of Visual Studio 2019.