Visual Studio 15 Release Date – (what we know so far)
A number of improvements have been released in Visual Studio “15” after the announcement of the Visual Studio “15” Preview 5 earlier in October. Can this indicate that the final release may be coming soon? There are many speculations among the users of the integrated development environment, which are looking forward to the newest functionalities, but unfortunately, there is still no official information about when we should expect Visual Studio 15 final release to be available for a mass usage. However, there are several great performance boosting features that have been announced by Microsoft just a few days ago, therefore we assume that the final release date may also be approaching.
Using various Microsoft software development platforms, Visual Studio “15” has been focused on making their developer tools easier to install, providing better performance, and enhancing the developers’ productivity. Staying true to that focus, a few days ago, the Visual Studio team revealed in their blog post what new improvements and changes they have been cooking up for their extension authors and the customers who are using extensions. This is a quick glimpse of the most interesting changes:
- A performance monitoring system for extensions has been added. It notifies the customers with a gold notification bar when an extension is slowing load time or typing speed; The monitoring system is focused on addressing three specific performance bottlenecks – Visual Studio startup performance, solution load performance, and overall responsiveness.
- Batched Extension Installations – another long requested feature, which make it easier to install, update and remove multiple Visual Studio extensions at once.
- The new Visual Studio installer now makes the Visual Studio more modular, by installing just the features you need for the work you’re doing. This small in size configuration saves time and gets installed in a few minutes, at the same time giving the developers the functionality they need, without unnecessary components and supporting features.
- There are some performance improvements, related to the extension authors as well. The changes to the standard VSIX extension format now enable the authors to add some powerful new capabilities such as lightweight solution load , which is still an “experimental” feature, and NGEN support for extensions.
- One of the last significant changes is the transition to the Visual Studio Marketplace as a place for discovering and installing extensions. It provides support to developer tools like the Visual Studio itself, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Team Services and makes it easier to find the desired ones in no time.
We are excited by some of the new features! What about you?