Microsoft starts outlining its Visual Studio 2019 plans
Microsoft is in the early planning phase for its next Visual Studio tool suite release, which will be known as Visual Studio 2019.
But now that the company also is on its way to becoming the owner of GitHub, and so much of its tools work is done in GitHub, company officials are opening up early on some of what to expect with the next release for both Windows and Mac.
Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2017 in March 2017. Officials are not yet saying whether Visual Studio 2019 will launch in calendar 2019; instead, they said they will say more in the coming months.
In a June 6 blog post, Partner Director of Program Management for Developer Tools John Montgomery did provide a few general goals for the Visual Studio 2019 release. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft's goal is to make the next release faster, more reliable, better for teams, easier to use and easier to get started with.
He added:
"Expect more and better refactorings, better navigation, more capabilities in the debugger, faster solution load, and faster builds. But also expect us to continue to explore how connected capabilities like Live Share can enable developers to collaborate in real time from across the world and how we can make cloud scenarios like working with online source repositories more seamless. Expect us to push the boundaries of individual and team productivity with capabilities like IntelliCode, where Visual Studio can use Azure to train and deliver AI-powered assistance into the IDE."
Meanwhile, in other Microsoft dev tool news around GitHub, there's a post worth reading on Microsoft's MSDN Blogs site from earlier this week about VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services), Team Foundation Server (TFS) and GitHub.
In that post, officials note the VSTS team plans to continue to invest in the Git open source ecosystem around Git, libgit2, Git for Windows, GVFS, etc. They also note that VSTS and TFS already integrate with GitHub and "that integration will continue to deepen."
More from that post:
"After the acquisition completes, GitHub will become another first class offering for VSTS customers. It will not live in the same portal as VSTS, but GitHub will have the same integration and traceability as our existing version control offerings. Over time we expect to grow GitHub to support the breadth of customer needs including enterprises. We are committed to you, our customers, and the solutions will live as parallel alternatives. Our intent is to provide TFS and VSTS services the same degree of traceability from code to cloud with GitHub as well as the current Git and TFVC version control solutions already hosted in VSTS and TFS."
Microsoft officials said this week that they are anticipating regulatory approval for the GitHub deal to happen before the end of 2018.