Visual Studio 2019 Debuts with Focus on AI and Productivity

As promised back in February, Microsoft rolled out Visual Studio 2019 today on April 2. The company says the latest Visual Studio version is now up and running, available to anyone. The release ends five months of preview since its launch in December 2018. VS 2019 is available for Windows 10 and Mac. Visual Studio 2019 may not be making sweeping changes, but it does see Microsoft put more productivity in the hands of developers. For example, the company wants to connect dev's more efficiently with a new start experience. Here VS 2019 users can easily clone GitHub repos to continue working on projects. This new start window experience also increases the available coding space, while also boasting a new search tool, smarter debugging, AI-powered assistance, and access to VS Live Share. A new search experience is also part of Visual Studio 2019. Microsoft describs the new search feature as a solution for users who are inspecting multiple variables in Locals or scrolling through Watch looking for an object.

For example, users can now more intuitively highlight and navigate the exact location they want. Navigation is possible to the value, name, and type columns of each search match. One of the core abilities of the feature is finding keywords faster by search and highlighting.

AI Tools

IntelliCode is a big part of the VS 2019 feature-set. This is a tool Microsoft initially introduced at Build 2018. IntelliCode leverages AI tools to give developers increased productivity. The company says its AI has been trained on over 2,000 open-source repos. Developers using Python in Visual Studio Code can now leverage IntelliCode through the IntelliSense AI tool. IntelliSense is a code completion tool that helps developers speed up work. Microsoft sums up the tool as a sort of predictive text service, but for code. In other words, it offers code suggestions as dev's type. It goes without saying that coding can be complicated so suggestions could be hundreds of numerals long. IntelliSense uses AI algorithms to select the most relevant code form what has already being inputted. Live Share is now integrated into the code editor by default on Visual Studio 2019. Live Share has several real-time tools to help developers create shared desktop applications, comment on code through sharing, and more. As for Live Share, the VS extension has new features to boost collaboration abilities for dev's, including real-time tools. Developers can now share desktop applications, comment on code while sharing, and more.