I tried out VS 2019 last year on a whim. The last time I used VS before that was in the early 2000s (probably 6.0).

It was a surprisingly bad experience - weirdly slow even on a high performance PC and so much clutter by default.

Tried out VS 2022 just now. First impressions are better.

2022 was the first VS in 64 bit, the increase in responsiveness was enough to make me switch back from rider

It's probably due to optimizations in high level code rather than the 32/64-bit aspect, but I'm just guessing. (To get that level of slowness you really have to fuck up at a higher level.)

VS seems to be a WPF app nowadays, so I assume the UI is written in C#.

Since Visual Studio 2010.