This week it has been really fun being a .NET developer. Previews of Visual Studio 2019 and .NET Core 3.0 has been made available to the community, making it possible to try out the new upcoming features.
I will not just repeat information that you can find on other sites, instead I will provide some good links, some tips on how to set up VS 2019 in order to test .NET Core 3 and C# 8, and some personal reflections.
Visual Studio 2019 Preview
You can find a summary on all the new features in Visual Studio 2019 in the official release notes and download it from the official site.
One feature that I find really interesting that I didn’t know about before testing the 2019 preview is Visual Studio Live Share which comes enabled by default in the preview. I had the opportunity to try it out with one of my colleagues running a test TDD session where he wrote the tests and I wrote the implementation. It was a lot of fun! Live share is also available for Visual Studio Code, so you are not limited to .NET development or even Windows.
I was also able to install extensions, such as VsVim, without any issues. So hopefully your favorite extensions in Visual Studio 2017 works in 2019 as well.
So far I haven’t had any major issues with the preview, I had one crash where it stopped responding and automatically restarted after a short while, but nothing else. I will however keep testing it and try out more complex use cases, such as profiling and visual editing of XAML files.
If you are interested in trying out new things I really recommend testing the preview. It can be installed alongside your current Visual Studio version without impacting it, so you will be able to continue to work as normal when you wish.
.NET Core 3.0 preview and C# 8.0
.NET Core 3.0 will support C# 8.0. The preview supports some of the new features such as Nullable References, Ranges and indicies, and Asynchronous Streams. You can read more about upcoming C# 8.0 features here.
Visual Studio 2019 Preview has support for .NET Core 3.0 but it requires some configuration. First you need to install Visual Studio 2019 and select to install the .NET Core workflow (it can be done later through the Visual Studio Installer if you forgot to add it initially). Then you need to download and install the .NET Core 3.0 Preview SDK, create a new .NET core project and configure it for .NET Core 3.0 and C# 8.0.
Also, Nullable References is not enabled by default so once you have configured your project to use .NET Core 3.0 and C# 8.0 you still have to edit your project file (.csproj) to enable it. Note that this has to be done for each new project you add to the solution.
A tip is to also configure your projects to ”Treat warnings as errors”. By doing that your code will not compile if you don’t handle possible null references properly.
Conclusion
It feels like it will be a good year to be a .NET developer next year. The new Visual Studio 2019 has the potential to make a great IDE even better and .NET Core 3.0 and C# 8.0 will add new improvements that will make it easier to write cleaner and safer .NET code.