What, develop up to 3 TIMES FASTER? 🤔

✅ Yes, you’re reading the right thing.

Now you might be wondering how is this possible??

It all comes based on the article I did some time ago. In that article I talked quite a bit about the new features. To put you a little bit in context 👇

• 64-bit version
• New user interface
• Integration with .NET MAUI

And yes, those new features were very cool and amazing. They looked like they were going to be amazing and that they were going to improve performance a lot. But those are not all the new features, the best one that will blow your mind is missing... 🤯

🔥 Hot Reload plus

If you are not familiar with Hot Reload, don’t worry, you are in the right article to understand it and MORE.
But if you already knew what it was you might be wondering…

What does “plus” mean? 🤔

This adjective was given by me, because when a couple of months ago Microsoft made public this feature, there was hardly any information about it, and just recently they have unveiled many new features of Hot Reload and yes, there are also PERFORMANCE TESTS!

So stay till the end not to miss anything. 😎

💻What is Hot Reload?

To understand all this you first need to understand what Hot Reload is.

This feature allows you to make changes to the interface while the project is in debugging and apply them without having to restart debugging. That is to say:

WE CAN MAKE CHANGES IN THE APPLICATION WHILE IT IS RUNNING IN REAL TIME 🤯

📚If you want to try this:

• Simply install .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022

• Run your app through the Visual Studio debugger (F5)

• When your app is running, you will be able to make changes to the code and apply them with the new “apply code changes” button.

In upcoming releases, .NET Hot Reload will also be available for Android, iOS and macOS, and we will also integrate XAML Hot Reload and Visual Live Tree.

🔴The Visual Studio 2022 Hot Reload

We already saw a while ago that Microsoft focused on scalability with the initial 64-bit Visual Studio release. And most interesting was this image, which showed how Visual Studio could open 1,600 projects and 300,000 files in a matter of seconds 👇

This really is INCREDIBLE! The scalability is huge and no one would have any problem anymore in developing huge solutions. But of course, Microsoft is Microsoft and I knew they weren’t going to stop there, they were bringing something else they hadn’t shown yet… until today🤯

In this latest update, specifically Preview 4, Microsoft has finally unveiled a bunch of performance and debugging improvements.

If I were Microsoft I would have thought that way too:

Developer🧔: We’ve improved scalability tremendously! We’ve managed to optimize Visual Studio so much that projects can now be enormous!🤗

Project manager👱‍♂️: Great! Now let’s take a break😎

Developer🧔: Break? I don’t have that word in my dictionary 🐱‍👤

(And so began the performance improvement implementation of Visual Studio)

Back to where we were going.

Microsoft focused on improving the speed of many types of operations in Visual Studio.

Let’s see what it brings 👇

📌New Hot Reload improvements

• Optimization when processing the symbol database.

• 11% increase in the semantic placement process in IntelliSense.

• Improvement X2 when expanding elements in our solution explorer.

And what has surprised me the most, is that now, the file search is up to X3 FASTER!!!

This Hot Reload that we are talking about also brings integration with Razor and CSS pages:

• Razor: Now when we are making changes to the C# code in any Razor file, we will simply have to “save” and all the changes will be automatically made in our ASP.NET application, and of course, without having to recompile everything again manually 😉

• CSS: Now CSS will have the Hot Reload implementation, so we can make any change and when we save it, that change will be effective instantly (as long as there are no errors in the code) otherwise… BOOOM 💥

And this is all? NO! So let’s move on.

The next new features that Visual Studio 2022 brings are 👇

• App Reset: With this feature you will be able to restart your running applications very easily. The best of all is that it doesn’t matter if you started the application with the debugger or without it. This is mainly included, in short, in case Hot Reload fails.

• Hot Reload on save: In previous versions you could only use Hot Reload with ASP.NET projects. Now with this new update you can do it with any project that supports the Hot Reload feature, so all changes will be applied on save.

• New configuration access: There will now be a new Hot Reload configuration panel to provide a better experience when using Hot Reload. This panel will be located under the “options” tab.

• New Hot Reload button: they have updated the icon and now the button will change from being called “apply code changes” to “Hot Reload” (I think this is the feature that excites me the most).

To conclude my conclusion, these features are very, very GOOD, especially in terms of performance when developing any kind of huge application that requires a lot of resources. We will follow very closely any news from Microsoft about future updates and “improvements”.

(I put it in quotation marks because many times these “improvements” turn out to be “disadvantages” and end up worsening performance or hindering usability).

And my other conclusion, which is very deep, is that by Microsoft optimizing Visual Studio, all developers will be forced to optimize the amount of daily coffees, because they would not be synchronized with Microsoft updates.