Software Update: Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 17.0.3

Microsoft has released version 17.0.3 of Visual Studio 2022. This popular programming development environment has useful options to make programming easier in Visual C++, Visual Basic, C#, F# and Python, among others. The new version is fully 64bit and has a new simplified user interface. More information about this release is in this announcement from Microsoft and on our front page. The following improvements have been made in this update:

Bidirectional text control character rendering

To prevent a potentially malicious exploit that allows code to be misrepresented, the Visual Studio editor will no longer allow bidirectional text control characters to manipulate the order of characters on the editing surface. A new option will cause these bidirectional text control characters to be shown with placeholders. The bidirectional text control characters will still be present in the code as this behavior only impacts what is rendered in the code editor.

This functionality is controlled in Tools\Options. Under the Text Editor\General page there is an option for “Show bidirectional text control characters”, which will be checked by default. When checked, all bidirectional text control characters will be rendered as placeholders. Unchecking the option will revert to the previous behavior where these characters are not rendered.

A Unicode character is considered a bidirectional text control character if it falls into any of the following ranges: U+061c, U+200e-U+200f, U+202a-U+202e, U+2066-U+2069.

Other Issues Addressed in Release 17.0.3

• Fixed a crash in the Web Forms Designer
• Fixed an issue where CSS completion for !important would insert text at the wrong location in HTML or Razor files.
• Fixed a regression with Xamarin.Forms XAML Hot Reload conflicting with libraries that shared similar dependencies, such as SignalR. Xamarin.Forms XAML Hot Reload should now be able to interoperate no matter what is loaded in your application.
• Fixed an issue where Project Overview Pages, Diagnostic Tools or Performance Profiler windows would sometimes be blank.
• Fixed an issue in razor file editing where the cursor would sometimes jump to a different location mid-typing.