The next major version of Microsoft’s flagship software development suite will be named Visual Studio 2019. And … we don’t really know much more about it.

“Our team is focused on introducing features that make every developer more productive,” Microsoft’s John Montgomery announced today. “Now, it’s time to start to look at what comes next: Visual Studio 2019.”

Here’s what we do know so far.

• Microsoft is “now in the early planning phase” for both Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio for Mac.
• Visual Studio 2019 will be faster, more reliable, and more productive for individuals and teams. And it will be easier to use, and easier to get started with.
• Visual Studio 2019 will provide more and better refactorings, better navigation, more capabilities in the debugger, faster solution load times, and faster builds.
• Visual Studio 2019 previews will install side by side with Visual Studio 2017 and won’t require a major operating system upgrade. So it will be a simple, easy upgrade for developers.
• Timing is … unclear. “We’ll say more in the coming months,” Montgomery says. “But be assured we want to deliver Visual Studio 2019 quickly and iteratively.” There’s no preview or early version to test yet.

With so little information, you may be wondering why Microsoft even announced the product. But Montgomery has a reason: Because Microsoft uses GitHub to develop Visual Studio, users are going to start seeing check-ins for the new product.

Given the release history, my guess is that Visual Studio 2019 will ship in late 2018. It seems like each release takes about 18 months, and Visual Studio 2017 first shipped in March 2017.

Tagged with Visual Studio, Visual Studio Mac