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Rider 2022.1 Roadmap
We’re excited about the incredible apps you’ll be building in the upcoming year, with the help of your favorite IDE, Rider. It feels like yesterday when we released 2021.3, and we’re already working hard on the 2022.1 release. Overall, we’ve labeled it a Quality Release with a focus on squashing bugs, fine-tuning features and evolving with the changes in .NET 6. In this roadmap post, we’ll talk about some of the things the Rider team is working on.
Keep in mind that plans are always subject to change, and some changes may be bumped to a later release. Also remember to check out our ReSharper 2022.1 roadmap, as some of those features will come to Rider as well!
Let’s get into it!
Game Development
The reception to Rider for Unity has been overwhelmingly positive and we continue to make improvements to Rider for Unity, helping game developers write beautiful and performant Unity code.
We’ve also made huge strides to support Unreal Engine (UE) with Rider for Unreal Engine and have plans to release it this year. Rider for Unreal Engine supports native C++, can read UE Blueprints for enhanced navigation, enforce code naming conventions, and so much more. What’s more, Unreal Engine support will be merged in the regular Rider release in version 2022.1.
You can have the Rider experience you love, whether you’re building games for Unity or Unreal Engine.
Debugger improvements
Parallel Stacks and Memory visibility
For the next release of Rider, we’re looking at better surfacing information about parallel stacks and memory visibility, making data more readily available to you during a debug session. In addition, we’re considering all scenarios where Rider can offer more contextual features to help you quickly understand your application’s state.
Docker “Fast Mode”
Who wants to go faster? Well, everybody! The industry is heading towards containerizing everything at warp speed. We’re currently investigating Fast Mode to build Docker and Docker-Compose solutions, which should significantly cut build times during development.
Building your projects within a container can be significantly slower than building the same project on your local machine. Fast mode will first create the base stage of your Docker image using docker build, but then build your project on your host machine, which is significantly faster. Finally, the project artifacts are mounted to the docker container as a volume. This mode is for Debug configurations only, and projects built under Release will build using the steps found in your Dockerfile.
New Toolbar improvements & customization
In the previous release of Rider, we introduced our community to the new toolbar with a lot of positive feedback. While we feel it’s a great start, we’re actively working on dialing in the experience for you. We’ve also received feedback from folks who would like the option to customize the toolbar. You will see visual improvements and obtain the ability to customize the toolbar in the future release of Rider.
VCS diffing behavior
Rider’s VCS tooling is a highlight for folks who prefer a GUI experience when interacting with their source control. While a great experience today, we’ve identified some inconsistencies with diffing behavior we hope to make more predictable. The changes to diffing behavior will also align closely with the behaviors found in our other IDEs, giving polyglot developers coming from WebStorm, PyCharm, or IntelliJ IDEA a more consistent experience.
Editor
Alt+Enter search
It’s simply amazing how many quick actions are available in Rider. However, as a new user, you may feel overwhelmed or lost trying to find the quick action you’d like to run on your code. Therefore, we’re working hard to redesign the Alt+Enter menu.
In the redesign, the menu will be getting discoverability features that will allow you to narrow the list of results better and find actions that are not immediately visible. We also think this will be a great way to learn shortcuts as you discover quick actions.
Font zoom indicator
Rider’s font-zooming feature is often-used, whether you are pair programming with team members, giving a presentation to an audience, or need a bigger font for a moment. However, zooming is temporary, and we’re working on allowing you to get back to your default settings faster by showing a Font Zoom Indicator. The new UI element will let you see how your zooming displays the font size in points and allow you to reset the default font size with a single click.
Remote development and Code With Me
The most significant upcoming change in software development will be working remotely. At JetBrains, we’re leading the charge into the future with collaborative development via Code With Me, and remote development with JetBrains Gateway.
As you may have guessed already, we’re planning to introduce remote development to Rider users. If you’re unfamiliar with remote development, it allows you to run your development environment on a remote machine instance and connect a local UI to said backend. Remote development will enable you to scale your development workflow to meet your needs by using cloud resources.
Sadly, when it comes to Code with Me (CWM) and remote development with Rider, we’re still working to resolve some issues with the experience, primarily around synchronizing documents between guests, the frontend IntelliJ host, and the backend ReSharper host. This will likely mean support will not be ready for the 2022.1 release. We understand many folks using our other IDEs have been waiting for this support in Rider, but we want to provide the same great experience in Rider that the other IDEs currently have.
What’s next?
As mentioned in the introduction, this post outlines our plans for the next release of Rider. We labeled it a Quality Release, where our focus is on making current experiences better.
Keep in mind plans are subject to change, but we are planning some quality-of-life improvements and fantastic features to use when building your apps. For example, parallel stacks and memory visibility will make debugging better, while Docker fast mode should help you containerize your apps faster. In addition, the UI enhancements will continue to fine-tune the Rider user experience you love. Finally, game-engine support will bring a new development paradigm to the gaming community.
So be sure to get a hold of the Rider 2021.1 Early Access Program (EAP) build and help us as we invest in the future of Rider and .NET development.
Thanks for reading, and please be sure to let us know which of the items you’re most excited about in the comments.
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