New Features in Visual Studio 2015 RC

Introduction

Visual Studio 2015 RC has major changes including an integrated suite of developer productivity tools, cloud services and extensions that enable you and your team to create great apps and games for the web, for Windows Store, for the desktop, for Android and for iOS. This article highlights some of the most important features in the Visual Studio 2015 RC IDE.

The following are the new features in Visual Studio 2015 RC.

1. Sign In across multiple accounts
   
   You can work with multiple user accounts in Visual Studio by adding them as you go or through the new Account Manager. Then, you can switch among those accounts on the fly when connecting to services or accessing online resources. Visual Studio remembers the accounts you add so you can use them from any instance of Visual Studio or Blend.
   
   
   
   Figure 1: You can add multiple accounts in Visual Studio by clicking on Add an account link
   
   
2. Choose your target platform(s)
   
   Visual Studio 2015 supports cross-platform mobile device development. You can write apps and games that target iOS, Android and Windows and share a common code base, all from within the Visual Studio IDE. You'll see all these new project types in the File, New Project dialog.
   
   And also support for classic desktop applications are better than ever, with many improvements to languages, libraries and tools. The following are the various platforms.
   
   
   • Cross-platform mobile apps in C# with Xamarin for Visual Studio
   • Cross-platform mobile apps in HTML/CSS/JavaScript with Apache Cordova
   • Cross-platform mobile games in C# with Unity
   • Classic desktop and Windows Store
   • Cross-platform mobile games in C# with Unity
   • Cross-platform apps and libraries for native C++
   • Web
   
   ASP.NET 5 is a major update to MVC, Web API and SignalR and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. ASP.NET 5 has been designed from the ground up to provide you with a lean and composable .NET stack for building modern cloud-based apps. The Visual Studio 2015 RC tooling is more closely integrated with popular web development tools such as Bower and Grunt.
   
3. Live code analysis (Light Bulbs)
   
   In Visual Studio 2015 RC, light bulbs display in the left margin (when using the keyboard) or a tool tip (when hovering over an error with the mouse). The light bulbs indicate in real time that the compiler (possibly using a custom rule set) has detected an issue in your code and also has a suggestion for how to fix the issue. When you see a light bulb, click on it for actionable suggestions.
   
   
   
   Figure 2: Live code analysis - image reference from MSDN site
   
   
4. Design your UI
   
   The Blend experience for designing XAML user interfaces has been significantly enhanced. Blend has been completely redesigned to provide a more intuitive UI, more powerful XAML editing capabilities and better integration with Visual Studio.
   
5. Diagnose Issue
   
   
   • Advance Breakpoints
     
     Breakpoints in the debugger are significantly more configurable and the UI for interacting with breakpoints is consolidated into a peek window so that you never need to leave the code editor.
     
     
     
     Figure 3: Breakpoint with expression condition -Image reference from MSDN site
     
     
   • Performance Tips
     
     Performance tips display the execution time of methods during debugging, enabling you to quickly spot bottlenecks without having to invoke the profiler.
     
     
     
     Figure 4: Elapsed time (Image from MSDN site)
     
     
   • Error List
     
     The error list now supports filtering on any column. It is also scalable enough to show a live view of errors, warnings and code analysis across your entire C# or Visual Basic solution as you type, even when a code change produces thousands of warnings. The new Error List is backward-compatible with existing usage.
     
   • GPU Usage Tool
     
     The GPU Usage Tool helps you collect and analyze GPU usage data in DirectX apps and games and troubleshoot whether performance bottlenecks are originating in the CPU or GPU.
     
6. Connect To Service
   
   The Add Connected Service wizard also integrates with the new Account Manager to make it easy to work with multiple user accounts and subscriptions. In Visual Studio 2015 RC, support for the following services are provided out of the box (assuming that you have an account):
   
   
   • Azure Mobile Services
   • Azure Storage
   • Office 365 (mail, contacts, calendars, files, users and groups)
   • Salesforce
     
   
   
   
   Figure 5: Add Connected Service (Image from MSDN site)
   
   
7. Synchronized Settings (Roaming Settings)
   
   Visual Studio 2015 improves on this experience by synchronizing more of your settings and synchronizing settings across the Visual Studio family of applications, like Professional, Enterprise, Express SKUs and Blend. Settings includes settings for some of the most commonly configured settings such as Text Editor, Key bindings, Theme and Fonts and Colors, Startup and Environment Aliases
   
8. High Resolution Images and Touch Support
   
   The Visual Studio IDE now has true high-resolution images on denser displays (in areas like menus, context menus, tool window command bars and in some projects in Solution Explorer). And on a touch-screen in the Visual Studio code editor window, you can now use gestures such as touch and hold, pinch, tap and so on to zoom, scroll, select text and invoke context menus.
   
9. Title Case Menu
   
   Visual Studio menus are once again title-case by default. However if you happen to like the ALL CAPS style, you can set it on start up or in the Tools > Options > General property page as in the following:
   
   
   
   Figure 6: Title Case Menu- Image reference from MSDN site
   
   
10. Custom Layouts
    
    You can create store and roam custom window layouts. For example, you can define one preferred layout for use on your desktop machine and a different layout for use on a laptop or small screen device. Or you may prefer one layout for a UI project and another for a database project. Key bindings enable you to rapidly switch among layouts. These layouts are available on any instance of Visual Studio when you are signed in.
    
    
    
    Figure 7: Custom Layout (Image from MSDN site)
    
    
11. Notification Hub
    
    The UI for the notification hub has been streamlined to make it easier to scan quickly. Additional kinds of notifications have been added, including performance issues, rendering issues and crashes and you can now tell Visual Studio to stop showing a notification.
    
    
    
    Figure 8: Notification Hub (image from MSDN site)
    
    
12. Code Lens: Find what happened to your code (Enterprise and Professional editions only)
    
    You can review changes and other history for work items, bugs, code reviews and so on for code that's stored in Visual Studio Online (VSO) or in Team Foundation Server (TFS).
    
    In Visual Studio Enterprise and Visual Studio Professional, you can now:
    
    
    • Get the history for an entire code file in the Visual Studio editor.
      
      
      
      Figure 9: Code Lens (image from MSDN site)
      
      
    • See a graph that shows the people that have changed your code. This can help you find patterns in your team's changes and assess their impact.
      
      
      
      
      
      Figure 10: Code Lens (image from MSDN site)
      
      
    • Easily see when your code was last changed.
    • Find changes in other branches that affect your code.

Reference

Main Reference: MSDN library https://msdn.microsoft.com for image references also.

Conclusion

This article covers nearly all the new general features of Visual Studio 2015 RC IDE. Visual Studio by default provides support for C#, C and C++, JavaScript, F#, and Visual Basic. Third parties as well as Microsoft offer extensions to support many other languages, including Python, Unity for Game and Apache Cordova. I hope you enjoy this article.