VS2022 Readiness Update

If you are reading this post, you already know that Microsoft has announced a new version of Visual Studio 2022. And of course, we make sure that our products are available to help you improve your code and code documentation.

TLDR; We already have a version of GhostDoc Pro, GhostDoc Enterprise, and CodeIt.Right, that is compatible with Visual Studio 2022 Preview. If you are interested in trying these out, see the details at the end of this post.

Visual Studio is 64-bit

The most exciting news about Visual Studio 2022 is that it will be 64-bit. This is a giant leap forward as far as the memory available to the Visual Studio environment!

Due to the existing Visual Studio being a 32-bit process, it can only use a maximum of 4 GB of memory. That memory is shared between the project files, the runtime, the extensions, and the VS environment itself.

So regardless of how powerful your development rig is, current Visual Studio can only use some 4GB of memory, even if you got 32GB available.

VS2022 being x64 is excellent news! Especially if you have large solutions!

What does this mean for CodeIt.Right and GhostDoc?

Since both CodeIt.Right and GhostDoc are VS extensions and exist within that VS environment’s space, both will be taking advantage of the “breathing freedom” that a 64-bit environment provides.

Will CodeIt.Right and GhostDoc work with the new x64 Visual Studio?

Yes, they will. In fact, they already work with the VS2022 Preview 1!

Will Visual Studio x64 improve CodeIt.Right and GhostDoc performance?

It will! It is hard to tell at this point how great the improvement will be but just by the mere fact that on large solutions, our products won’t have to offload data to a drive cache and keep in memory – provides a massive improvement in performance!

When VS2022 compatible builds of CodeI.Right and GhostDoc will be available?

They are available as part of our INSIDERS testing program publicly right now! Use the button below.

Generally, with the new major VS releases, we have our products compatible with the first production-ready VS build. Typically this would be a VS pre-release build, sometimes a late beta. Microsoft does not recommend using the previews and betas for production use as these are intended for testing and evaluation.

But given the great interest in the x64 version of Visual Studio, as we already mentioned, we prioritized and currently have builds of GhostDoc Pro, GhostDoc Enterprise, and CodeIt.Right that are compatible with Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1. Please note: we do not have a GhostDoc Community edition build for VS2022 just yet.

While the version is compatible with VS2022, the VS itself is not quite ready for the extensions. One minor issue we are seeing is transparent tool windows in VS (no background). We have seen a very similar issue with VS19 Previews – the VS team has addressed that by the Beta version of VS19. Fixed now!

With the little caveat above, whenever you want to try the VS22 compatible GhostDoc Pro or Enterprise, just drop us a note at support at submain dot com, and we will hook you up with a nightly build download link.

Happy coding!