Microsoft has produced an updated roadmap for Visual Studio with details of what's planned up till June 2020. The team says it captures significant capabilities that they plan to add, but it’s not a comprehensive feature list.

The aim of publishing the roadmap is to clarify what’s coming so developers can plan for upgrades and provide feedback on which features they feel would make Visual Studio a more productive development environment.

The headline improvements are mainly to do with Blazor, Microsoft's ASP.NET Core tool that lets you use C# for web development rather than JavaScript. Blazor achieves this by using WebAssembly (WASM). Blazor enthusiasts say alongside the ability to use C#, it means you can make use of .NET libraries and get the benefits of .NET's performance and reliability, and also share apps logic across server and client.  The improvements to Blazor referenced in the update are to its debugging options. There are three improvements listed in the roadmap, though two are still at the planning stage. Listed as 'in progress' is the introduction of Visual Studio support for Blazor WASM debugging. WASM or WebAssembly is used for the client-side of Blazor to provide a compilation target for C# code. The other improvements to Blazor debugging are at the planning stage, and when implemented will add auto-refresh support for Blazor WASM, and Blazor WASM project creation with Identity providers.

Elsewhere on the roadmap,  the developers say they've worked on top user requests so that documents and tool windows pinned in the document well are remembered between sessions; open documents in a project are grouped in vertical tabs; and a button has been added to refresh search results and references windows.

A number of improvements have been made to ensure conformance to C++ 20, targeting of Unix-like systems from Visual Studio with C++ has been improved, and it's now easier to carry out CMake development with Visual Studio.

More Information

Visual Studio Roadmap

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