Microsoft today made a number of developer-oriented announcements that continue its theme of the last few years: the company wants its tools—and ultimately its platforms, especially Azure—to be the choice of every developer, no matter which languages and tools they use and no matter what platform they ultimately deploy on.
The centerpiece of Microsoft’s developer tools remains Visual Studio, and a first preview of its 2019 edition is now available to download. It integrates the awesome Live Share feature first demonstrated last year and expands IntelliCode, a machine-learning-driven extension to the IntelliSense developer assistance that’s been a part of Visual Studio for ages. IntelliCode examines source code repositories to build models of a range of different things, from code formatting preferences to library usage and development patterns.
Currently, IntelliCode works with C# in Visual Studio and Python in Visual Studio Code. It does so by using GitHub’s open source repositories as its training data. Visual Studio 2019 expands this to enable analysis of private repositories. It also increases the language compatibility; Visual Studio will add C++ and XAML support, while Visual Studio Code will pick up JavaScript, TypeScript, and Java support.