Interest in 64-bit VS can be traced back to as early as 2011 [1]. 6 years ago, there was an MSDN essay on why there wasn't going to be 64-bit VS for the foreseeable future [2] mainly citing issues speed, pointer size, and zombie code. I wonder what changed their minds. It's not like these issues got any easier over years.
I guess the big news is the support for 64-bit. Good that it didn't take them that long - the first Windows version on a 64 bit architecture is not even 20 years old yet. Windows XP for IA-64 was released in October 2001 [1].
It's pretty frustrating as a Visual Basic user that Microsoft has taken the "just don't talk about it" approach, at this point. It's still "supported" and allegedly still "valued", but Microsoft continues to make it clear the way forward for .NET development is new platforms that conveniently, they aren't bothering to support with VB. MAUI will not support VB. Blazor will not support VB (despite community members getting it to work). If you want to write a cross-platform command line app, shockingly that is the most modern thing you can do with VB, but that's where it ends.
VB is officially just relegated to WinForms, WPF, and UWP, all frameworks that Microsoft has pretty much decided they are done with.
Similar yet different problem for F#. It's officially supported and F# does get included more than VB, but I feel like that is mostly only down to a very vocal minority.
I think someone at Microsoft who is fundamentally in power of the .NET platform has secretly decided that VB and F# must go away in the long term. All innovation is done for C# only. VB will basically die when current VB developers die. Nothing at Microsoft advertises for new developers to learn VB. F# is just being fed small inexpensive tokens every now and then to keep the F# community quiet until one day C# has inherited all functional paradigms from F# including partial function application and syntactic sugar like optionally omitting semi colons and then F# developers will be told to get lost as well.
At what point/to what degree do we think VSCode will feed back into Visual Studio in the future (in terms of UX, implementation, or otherwise)? I don't see them totally converging any time soon, because Visual Studio has a huge legacy audience that needs continuity, and not just "it basically can do the same things". But I believe Live Share started in Code, for example.
There's clearly already some visual resemblance- I'm just curious what the future might hold for the relationship between these two products
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20170922120502/https://visualstu... [2]https://web.archive.org/web/20160119114948/http://blogs.msdn...