Visual Studio 2019 is the next major version of Microsoft's developer tool

Microsoft today offered a look at what's next for Visual Studio, including a peek at the next major release: Visual Studio 2019. In its blog post, the company is light on details, but it did offer up some of its goals for the release.

According to Microsoft, the company is still in the "early planning phase" for Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio for Mac. Along with general improvements to make the developer tool more reliable and more productive, Microsoft has some concrete goals in mind. From Microsoft:

Expect more and better refactorings, better navigation, more capabilities in the debugger, faster solution load, and faster builds. But also expect us to continue to explore how connected capabilities like Live Share can enable developers to collaborate in real time from across the world and how we can make cloud scenarios like working with online source repositories more seamless. Expect us to push the boundaries of individual and team productivity with capabilities like IntelliCode, where Visual Studio can use Azure to train and deliver AI-powered assistance into the IDE.

Once it enters preview, developers will be able to install Visual Studio 2019 right alongside Visual Studio 2017. That said, there's no timeline available for release, with Microsoft only promising more information in "the coming months."

In the meantime, if you're eager to get an early peek at features coming to the current Visual Studio 2017, you can sign up to test the Visual Studio Preview. Hopefully, we'll learn more about what to expect from the 2019 release soon.