What is New in Visual Studio 2015

Manish Tewatia
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Today is 14, November in the evening and I still have a hangover from #VSConnect after watching live sessions the entire night last night. When I woke up today I thought it was a dream that I had about the awesome announcements in Visual Studio Connect(). Then I checked my Twitter @mtewatia and oh, it was not a dream. Visual Studio did it. It is a really big day for the Visual Studio community. Microsoft released the preview version of the next Visual Studio named “Visual Studio 2015”.

This time it is not just another version, it comes with many new features and tools for developers, including the open source community and .NET 4.6 Preview.

Note: When you install the .NET Framework 4.6 Preview version it could appear as 4.5.3 in some places. It will be updated to 4.6 before the final version ships.

I can't say right now how many features are among all of them that I will be using, but yes for now I can't prevent myself from installing it right away and you should also try too and send your valuable feedback to Microsoft and help them to improve your favorite IDE before the final version comes up, after all it is for us.

Since Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 4.6 Preview are for testing and feedback purposes only, Microsoft recommends installing it in a virtual machine or on a computer that is available for reformatting.

You can download Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 4.6 Preview from the following sources and just run the downloaded exe file.

And the installation begins.

Figure 1

You can see in Figure 2 that by default none of the options are selected and you need to select at least one to proceed, I prefer to go with all of them. Let's see all the improvements that Microsoft has done.

Figure 2

While the installation is in progress, let's go through the list of new features/improvements that Microsoft has done in this release of Visual Studio 2015.

Figure 3

The following are the new features announced by Microsoft:

Visual Studio C++ for Cross-Platform Development
Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova
Visual Studio Emulator for Android
C++ improvements
C# and Visual Basic improvements
.NET Framework 4.6
Entity Framework improvements
Visual Studio IDE improvements
Blend
Debugging and Diagnostics improvements
ASP.NET improvements
TypeScript
Unit Tests
Application Insights
Release Management
Git version control
CodeLens
Architecture, Design and Modeling

The new Visual Studio 2015 is compact with Microsoft's Roslyn .Net compiler platform, ASP.NET 5 and support of Apache Cordova tooling. PEX, Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova and standard support for Visual C++ are part of the preview, as well.

Every developer loves the new absolutely nice and pleasant code refactoring experience, revamped watch and immediate window that will allow you to write lambdas and LINQ when debugging and many more exciting features waiting for us.

“We really want to open up access in a friction-free way to broader set of people" said S. Somasegar, corporate vice president, Developer Division, Microsoft. The Community version will "let you develop any and all kinds of apps -- desktop, web, cloud, devices".

My Visual Studio installation seems completed here.

Figure 4

Since this time Microsoft goes out of the box and is embracing cross-platform too, after installing Visual Studio successfully, setup asks you to go for installing additional features for Cross Platform Mobile Development. You can skip that also if you don't want to go cross-platform for the time, but I am going for it.

Figure 5

Here there are also options available for selection and you can select what you need and move forward.

Again, I am going for everything, I don't want to miss anything here.

While the Secondary Installer is in progress, see what I will get in this additional software tools package:

Figure 6

Visual Studio 2015 Preview adds support for cross-platform mobile development using C++ leveraging the open source Clang and LLVM toolchain, enabling you to share, reuse, build, deploy and debug libraries for other operating systems in Visual Studio.

New Secondary tools to be installed are:

Android Native Development Kit (R10, 32)
Android SDK (API Level 19)
Apache Ant (1.9.3)
Git CLI
Google Chrome
Java SE Development Kit (7.0.550.13)
Joynt Node.js
Microsoft Visual Studio Emulator for Android
SQLLite
WebSocket 4Net

Note: Visual Studio 2015 Preview supports only Android with Xamarin not JAVA.

Let's check, I think the Secondary Installation has completed.

Figure 7

Oops, what is that all about? Some error has occured as you can see in the following:

Figure 8

Click on continue, let's see what the issue is.

I am not sure why this error occurred, well it's just asking to choose the development settings.

Figure 9

Now I am just one step away from starting to use my Visual Studio 2015, choose the development settings and color them based on what you like most for your platform and BTW everything can be customized later.

Figure 10

Awesome. Since I don't expect having any issues, I now have Visual Studio 2015 installed successfully on my Window 8.1.

Let's start a new project and see what's new that we have in Visual Studio 2015 Preview.

Figure 11

Pretty cool, it seems cool to be working with the new improvements for the future.

There are many more features/improvements announced in #VSConnect that I will surely cover in my future articles. Some of them are: