Version 17.5 Preview 2 brings a wide range of improvements to the IDE including an experimental implementation of C11 atomics in MSVC.

Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 2, the second preview of a planned upgrade to Microsoft’s signature IDE (integrated development environment), adds a number of usability improvements including a new search experience, .NET capabilities such as publishing ASP.NET projects to Azure Container Apps, and C++ capabilities such as experimental support for C11 atomics.

Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 2 was published December 13, and is now accessible from the Visual Studio website. For C++, Microsoft has added an experimental implementation of C11 atomics to MSVC (Microsoft C++), available as an option with the /experimental:c11atomics flag in /std:c11 mode or later. Operations on atomic types are operations that are guaranteed to be executed as a single transaction.

Currently only lock-free atomics are supported, but plans call for extending support to locking atomics as well. C11 atomics add the <stdatomic.h> library header, the _Atomic(T) type specifier, and the _Atomic qualifier. The _Atomic qualifier is particularly useful for declaring structs or variables of structure types, because it does not require parentheses.

Also with Visual Studio 2022 17.5, Go To Definition for C++ now will use a more subtle indicator when the operation is taking more time, replacing the previous modal dialog. Microsoft also is shipping a native Arm64 Clang toolset with its LLVM workload, allowing native compilation on Arm64 machines. In another C++ improvement, Hot Reload now is supported in the CMake Project template, allowing developers to modify projects while running.

For .NET, Visual Studio 2022 17.5 now supports publishing to Azure Container Apps via Right-click > Publish for ASP.NET projects. This allows for publishing on demand and setting up CI/CD via GitHub Actions. Developers can view the application output for ASP.NET Core projects in the Integrated Terminal Tool Window instead of an external console window. If multiple ASP.NET Core projects are launched, each will show its output in a different Integrated Terminal Tool Window.

Also in Visual Studio 2022 17.5:

• A new search experience in the IDE makes it easy to quickly find menu feature files, types, and members in code all from one place. Improvements have been made to ordering and relevancy in code search. A preview panel in code search, meanwhile, supports code results for both C# and C++.
• A Sticky Scroll feature helps developers orient where they are in a file and understand the context of code.
• A new and improved text visualizer has additional tools and string manipulation options. Developers can do URL Encode and Decode, Base64 Encode, and Decode JWT easily.
• A Quick Add feature lets users add items to solutions without navigating through the New Item Dialog.
• Developers now can export a configuration file to configure contents of an offline installation layout.

Visual Studio 2022 17.4 was released last month in conjunction with .NET 7. Visual Studio 2022, released in November 2021, brought 64-bit support to the IDE.