Hello! We have very good news today. We just released Visual Assist 2021.5 and it has our official support for the Visual Studio 2022 release.
This blog could be as short as that sentence, but I’d like to write a bit more about our support and how we got here. Meanwhile I recommend if you’re using VS2022 you download and install 2021.5 now!
Background
Historically it’s been very important to us to release support for new versions of Visual Studio very quickly, and if you’ve read our blog posts this year about VS2022, you’ll have read me say that before. While many customers stay on older versions for some time, we have a lot of people who upgrade immediately, so we’ve always put a lot of emphasis on being able to ship a version of Visual Assist supporting new versions of Visual Studio quickly. While I’ve been product manager here for almost three years, this is the first new major version of Visual Studio during that time, and I and the whole team were keen to continue that speedy-support tradition.
We started work supporting VS2022 early, and we’ve shared our progress over this past nine months about the work we’ve been doing to support VS2022, with beta support for Previews 3, skipping 4 due to a breaking bug, and 5, 6, and 7/RC. We released Visual Assist 2021.4 shortly before Visual Studio 2022 was released, and many of you are using it with VS2022 already.
Visual Studio 2022 was a large change from previous versions. Not only did it change to 64-bit, but there are many new APIs as well, and these APIs change the interaction model from synchronous to asynchronous interaction. This is a pattern Visual Studio has been following for several years (and we encourage it—it really helps the IDE) but as you may know migrating from any sync to async model is rarely trivial. Usually, the majority of the work for each new Visual Studio release is around adapting to API changes, and that was the case here too. In fact, the most major bug we saw using Visual Assist (abbreviated VAX) 2021.4 with VS2022 and which was one of the issues we fixed for today’s official support, an issue where the code suggestions window sometimes did not show in the right place, was related to the move to one specific async API.
Timeline
- We released Visual Assist 2021.4 on October 29.
- Visual Studio 2022 was released on November 8, nine days later.
- VAX 2021.4 overall worked pretty well with the final VS2022 build
- But both we and some customers found a few more issues, and we’ve spent the past two weeks since VS’s release resolving them
- VAX 2021.5 with official support for Visual Studio 2022 was released on Nov 22!
Official Support for VS2022
Yesterday afternoon US time we posted Visual Assist 2021.5 on our website. We have a rolling release mechanism and in about a week you should see in-IDE notifications about the new release, followed a couple of weeks later with the new version being available in the Visual Studio Marketplace. However you can directly download and install it now.
We’ve been working on VS2022 for something like nine months now and we’re really happy to have Visual Assist publicly available with Visual Studio 2022 support. We hope it is useful to you!
A note of thanks: VS2022 was a large change from previous versions, and Microsoft has been very open and helpful. We’re very grateful to them for their communications with us, the beta program, and their assistance while we’ve added support. Thank you!
I want to note as well that though as PM I get to write these posts, I really do very little, and all the credit for this release and VS2022 support goes to our amazing team. Thank you!
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