Microsoft is making the near-final Release Candidate (RC) of Visual Studio 2022 available today. It also announced that November 8 will be the general availability date for VS 2022, which a virtual launch event will mark.

In addition to making the RC of VS 2022 available today, Microsoft also is rolling out Preview channel Release 5. The preview channel gives testers a monthly look at what's coming in the next minor version update of the current channel. Both the RC and GA versions of VS 2022 will have go-live licenses, meaning they are ready for production use.

Visual Studio 2022 is the first release of a 64-bit version of Visual Studio. By making Visual Studio 64-bit, officials said that they expect the release to make better use of all system resources, especially when working with more complex solutions over longer periods of time. According to Microsoft, during early VS 2022 testing, customers were able to run the VS IDE for days, even with solutions containing 700 or more projects.

Testers can download the RC from https://aka.ms/vs2022release and Preview 5 from https://aka.ms/vs2022preview.   

It's going to be a busy November for Microsoft developers. In addition to the VS 2022 launch, Microsoft will be holding a three day .NET Conf 2021 virtual event from November 9 to 11. The highlight of that event will be the launch of .NET 6.

In 2019, Microsoft announced that .NET 5 would be its first major deliverable on the road toward unifying .NET, but .NET 6 is where more of the magic will happen.  Microsoft will have completed the unification of the Mono runtime into Core, have one set of base libraries for all workloads and deliver one SDK nd project system across a number of operating systems and device targets with .NET 6. However, .NET MAUI won't be ready at that point; Microsoft now is targeting early Q2 2022 for the GA of .NET MAUI.

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