C++ atomics are added to Visual Studio 2022

Published on Dec 24, 2022

As part of version 17.5 Preview 2, a number of improvements have been made to the IDE, including an experimental implementation of C11 atomics in MSVC.

This version of Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 2, which is the second preview of a planned upgrade to Microsoft’s signature IDE (integrated development environment), enhances usability with a new search experience, .NET capabilities such as publishing ASP.NET projects to Azure Container Apps, and C++ capabilities such as experimental support for C11 atomics.

The Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 2 was published on December 13 and is now available on the Visual Studio website. MSVC (Microsoft C++) offers an experimental implementation of C11 atomics when using the /experimental:c11atomics flag in /std:c11 mode. Atomic operations are operations that are guaranteed to be executed as a single transaction.

Currently, only lock-free atomics are supported, but plans call for supporting locking atomics as well. As of C11 atomics, the stdatomic.h library header, the Atomic(T) type specifier, and the Atomic qualifier have been added. It is particularly useful for declaring structs or variables of structure types, since it does not require parentheses.

As part of Visual Studio 2022 17.5, Go To Definition for C++ will use a more subtle indicator when the operation is taking longer, replacing the previous modal dialog. A native Arm64 Clang toolset is also included with Microsoft’s LLVM workload, enabling native compilation on Arm64 systems. The CMake Project template now supports Hot Reload, which allows developers to modify projects as they run.

Visual Studio 2022 17.5 now supports publishing ASP.NET projects to Azure Container Apps via Right-click > Publish. By using GitHub Actions, it is possible to publish on demand and set up CI/CD processes. It is possible for developers to view the application output for ASP.NET Core projects in the Integrated Terminal Tool Window rather than in an external console window. Multiple ASP.NET Core projects will display their output in separate Integrated Terminal Tool Windows if they are launched simultaneously.

The following features are also included in Visual Studio 2022 17.5:

With the new search experience in the IDE, it is now easier to find menu feature files, types, and members of code all in one place. A number of improvements have been made to the ordering and relevance of code search results. The preview panel in code search, on the other hand, supports both C# and C++ code results.

By using Sticky Scroll, developers can understand the context of code and orient themselves within a file.

A new and improved text visualizer provides additional tools and string manipulation options. You can encode and decode URLs, Base64, and JWTs easily.

Quick Add lets users add items to solutions without going through the New Item Dialog.

It is now possible for developers to export a configuration file that can be used to configure the contents of an offline installation layout.

As part of the release of .NET 7, Visual Studio 2022 17.4 was released last month. As part of the release of Visual Studio 2022 in November 2021, 64-bit support was introduced to the IDE.