Visual Studio 2019 hits general availability on Windows and Mac, includes Live Share

Visual Studio logo
Visual Studio logo (Image credit: Microsoft)

Developers of all stripes can now get their hands on Visual Studio 2019. The latest version of the development tool is generally available starting today for Windows and Mac, bringing a ton of improvements for developers to check out.

New in Visual Studio 2019 are various UI tweaks, including a new start screen that has been redesigned to work with Git repositories. You'll also notice UI changes like a new icon, a blue theme, and a cleaner interface, once you've started a project.

Visual Studio's IntelliCode AI can also now be trained on your own repositories, meaning it will be better at suggesting coding patterns that appear in your own projects. This release also marks the launch of Live Share, which lets you collaborate on coding projects in real-time with other members of your team.

Those are the highlights, but other tweaks include improvements to code navigation, a document health indicator, and one-click code clean-up. You can check out the full release notes for Visual Studio 2019 to get a detailed rundown of what's new.

To coincide with Visual Studio 2019's launch, Microsoft is also holding a day-long streaming event, which includes plenty of sessions to go over what's new and how you can take advantage of the improvements.

You can download Visual Studio 2019 from Microsoft now.

Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl