Rider 2024.2 Roadmap

Sasha Ivanova

With the first Rider 2024.2 Early Access Program (EAP) build just around the corner, we thought we’d give you an idea of what we’re working on for the next major update. 

The following is a list of our priorities for the next release. Note that these are the features we’re working on, however some might have to be postponed slightly. 

Performance

After the release of Rider 2024.1, we received some valuable feedback on the IDE’s sluggish performance, particularly during debugging. In response, we conducted a thorough investigation and identified a couple of memory leaks, which we promptly fixed. 

This experience has sharpened our focus on Rider’s overall performance. We’re now dedicating more time and resources to monitoring and optimizing the IDE to ensure that it remains the top choice for developers seeking a highly performant tool for .NET and game development.

User experience

For Rider 2024.2, we’ll be reimagining the Navigation bar – something that was requested quite some time ago and supported by many of you. Keep an eye out for an announcement during this EAP cycle so you can test it and give us your feedback.

Debugger

In version 2024.2, Rider’s debugger is getting a Tasks view and a task dependencies graph.

The Tasks view will contain information about System.Threading.Tasks.Task and ValueTask objects to help you manage and monitor asynchronous operations more effectively. It will also provide insights into the state of each task, such as whether it’s running, completed, or faulty, along with all the relevant metadata.

Meanwhile, the task dependencies graph will make it easier to identify deadlocks, further aiding you in the debugging process. Please note that Mono is not supported in this version.

Game development

In this release cycle, we are investing most of our resources into improving the debugging experience for all supported game development engines. For Unity, this includes improving debugging for applications compiled using the IL2CPP scripting backend, enhancing the collections visualizer, and making various smaller fixes and improvements for shader variants.

Unreal Engine’s debugging experience will benefit from a new Modules view, which allows you to see a list of loaded modules. This feature provides a clear overview of the loaded DLLs and the symbol files in use. Additionally, we are working on addressing multiple bugs related to the Add to Watch feature. You can find more information on that here and here.

We’re working on improving the evaluation experience offered by the debugger, for example by allowing you to use the arrow (->), equal to (==), and not equal to (!=) operators in watch expressions, evaluation window, and conditional breakpoints for smart pointers. 

Beyond debugger improvements, Unreal Engine projects will receive a set of new inspections, updates for code insight, and further enhancements to Blueprint support.

For Godot, the upcoming update will introduce full support for the GDScript language, including the ability to debug. We’re aiming to maintain the compatibility with the existing community-driven plugin. Last but not least, the Godot support plugin is set to be bundled with Rider in the 2024.2 release.

Frameworks and technologies

The WinForms designer for .NET Core won’t be part of the 2024.2 EAP. We are, however, working towards having an initial version ready to share.

We’re making good progress, and the WinForms designer for .NET Core is nearing the stage where it can undergo testing by our QA teams. This is an important step for identifying and addressing any potential issues. When we’re confident the designer covers most use cases, we’d like to start rolling it out, even if it may not cover everything. 

You can follow our progress on this task here.

Full line code completion

Rider 2024.1 did not include one of the highlights of the 2024.1 release cycle for IntelliJ-based IDEs – LLM-powered full line code completion. The quality of the language models for C# did not meet our standards in time for the release, but we’ve been working hard on them, and we’ll be shipping full line code completion in one of our first EAP builds. 

You can help

While we do our best to deliver all our planned features, we also want to ensure that the new version of Rider is both functional and stable. And that’s where you can help us! Using EAP builds and giving us feedback is one of the best ways to help us deliver high-quality releases. The most active participants during our previous EAP were rewarded with complimentary one-year personal subscriptions to a dotUltimate product of your choice.

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