Developers can now take a peek at the next version of Microsoft Corp.’s Visual Studio integrated development environment for building software, applications, websites and other services.

The Redmond-based company this morning announced the initial preview of Visual Studio 2019 at its Connect(); developer conference, adding a bevy of new features designed to boost productivity and foster greater collaboration.

The improved productivity comes from the enhancements made to Visual Studio’s IntelliCode suite, which is an experimental set of artificial intelligence-assisted development capabilities that are meant to help developers work faster. Visual Studio 2019 introduces something called “custom models,” which Microsoft says are designed to improve the capabilities of IntelliSense, a “code completion tool” bundled with IntelliCode that developers can use to write sections of their code automatically.

The idea with custom models is to provide personalized suggestions to developers as they’re coding, based on the patterns and libraries in their code, in order to enhance productivity, Microsoft said. IntelliCode is compatible with C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python and Java.

The preview of Visual Studio 2019 is available now. Microsoft has also released a preview of Visual Studio 2019 for Mac that provides much of the same functionality as the main edition.

In order to help with collaboration, meanwhile, Microsoft is introducing new capabilities to Visual Studio Live Share, which is a service that lets developers share their entire application development environment. The new features include more “sharing desktop apps, source control diffs and code commenting”, the company said.

Visual Studio isn’t the only development tool getting some updates. Microsoft also debuted two new versions of its .NET Core general-purpose development platform for building cloud computing and “internet of things” applications. The latest version, .NET Core 2.2, comes with incremental updates covering things such as application programming interfaces and security. But more exciting, perhaps, is the preview release of .NET Core 3.0, which comes with a swath of updates aimed at making life easier for developers of cloud, IoT and AI workloads.

Lastly, Microsoft announced the public preview of ML.NET 0.8, which is a cross-platform machine learning framework developers can use to bake custom AI models into their software apps. With ML.NET, developers can easily build models for tasks including regression, classification and clustering, the company said.

ML.NET 0.8 is available in public preview starting today.

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