Since it is modular, a developer's experience of Visual Studio varies according to what is installed. The most downloaded at the time of writing is JetBrains ReSharper, for refactoring and navigating.

Visual Studio is extensible and supports a marketplace of add-ons. It is just as well, since developers often need to retain old versions for compatibility with existing code. At one time, Microsoft's advice for those trying VS previews was to wipe and reinstall Windows afterwards that no longer applies and different versions, both preview and release, now live happily side by side. Microsoft greatly improved the installation and maintenance of the product with Visual Studio 2017 (released in 2016) which featured the VS Installer, a separate application which manages the installation and update of all releases. The Visual Studio installer – a major improvement first seen in VS 2017Īs you would expect, Visual Studio is modular and the core IDE on its own does little. Although a substantial change, it is transparent to developers and from what we can tell, has been a beneficial change. The main benefit is for large solutions comprising hundreds of projects. The advantage is that it has access to more than 4GB memory in the devenv process, this being the shell of the IDE, though of course it is still possible to compile 32-bit applications. NET in 2002, 20 years ago, and this perhaps is the true ancestor of today's IDE.Ī big change in VS 2022, released November, is that it is the first version where the IDE itself runs as a 64-bit process. NET guise) development into the same IDE was Visual Studio. The first Visual Studio to integrate C++ and Visual Basic (in. Visual Studio itself was introduced in 1997, though it was more of a bundle of different Windows development tools initially. Perhaps inspired by VB, Microsoft delivered Visual C++ 1.0 in 1993, replacing the little-used PWB. The company also came up Visual Basic (VB, first released 1991), which unlike Microsoft C++ had a Windows IDE.

In the early days, Windows applications were coded and compiled using MS-DOS, and there was a MS-DOS IDE called Programmer's Workbench (PWB, first released 1989). The Visual Studio idea came from two main sources. Microsoft always had its own programming languages and tools, beginning with Microsoft Basic in 1975 and Microsoft C 1.0 in 1983. Review Visual Studio goes back a long way.

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