Microsoft officially announced the new version of Visual Studio 2015 and DotNet 4.6 which are available for download.
Over the last few years, the Visual Studio family has expanded to be broader than ever before.
At the core is the Visual Studio IDE that millions of developers around the world love and use day-in and day-out to build great applications. Last year, they have introduced Visual Studio Community – a fully-featured Visual Studio IDE which is free for non-enterprise development. Since November, they have seen over 5 million downloads of Visual Studio Community which is the fastest ever adoption of a Visual Studio product.
Two years ago, they have introduced Visual Studio Online, bringing a rich collection of cloud-hosted developer services to the Visual Studio Family – from source control to agile backlog management to hosted build and application insights. Now, they have more than 3.2 million developers registered for Visual Studio Online.
And earlier this year, in April, they released a preview of the new Visual Studio Code, a refined code editor for Mac, Linux and Windows supporting cross-platform web and cloud development. In the last 3 months, they have seen more than 500k downloads of Visual Studio Code, with nearly half of those downloads on Mac and Linux.
They said “this release of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 brings hundreds of new features for developers building for desktop, web, mobile, cloud and more”.
Visual Studio 2015 continues with improvements in productivity across debugging and diagnostics, code editing and refactoring, and programming languages.
Visual Studio 2015 unifies debugging and profiling into a single Diagnostics Tools window, bringing insights about the correctness and performance of the running application into context during development.
In the editor, C# and VB developers can use the new Roslyn-based tooling, including Light Bulbs that proactively suggest potential fixes or code refactorings tooling. With Roslyn’s code analyzers, developers can even customize the warnings and suggestions delivered inside the editor to meet their team’s needs.
They also added a brand new XAML editor with tons of new features to easily navigate through code including Peek.
Visual Studio 2015 also includes significantly improved support for C++ 11/14/17 along with TypeScript 1.5, F# 4.0 and tools for Python and dozens of other languages.
Visual Studio and .NET are offering the ability to target new platforms, to use new programming languages, and to take existing skills and applications to new environments.
Along with .NET 4.6, Microsoft also making available ASP.NET 4.6, the newest version of the Web development framework. ASP.NET 4.6 adds support for HTTP/2 as well as support for the newest C# features and the new Entity Framework 6.1.3. Visual Studio tooling for web development continues to expand to offer HTML and CSS tooling with up-to-date standards support and a much richer JSON editor. Developers can also use the preview of ASP.NET 5 in Visual Studio 2015.
Mobile development is increasingly about building mobile experiences that run across many mobile platforms. Visual Studio 2015 includes cross-platform mobile development tools for building applications targeting iOS, Android and Windows, and offers developers choice in what languages and technologies to use to developer their mobile applications.
Many developers start by building mobile-ready browser based applications using responsive HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Visual Studio 2015’s rich web tooling, integrated debugging and support for the latest web UI frameworks provide the tools needed to build great mobile-ready web sites.
Visual Studio 2015 offers integrated tools for Apache Cordova, enabling you to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript (or TypeScript) to build cross-platform mobile applications that deploy to the consumer on enterprise store.
Visual Studio 2015 even includes a high-performance Visual Studio Emulator for Android for debugging and testing Android applications.
Visual Studio 2015 also provides cross-platform C++ development for shared components targeting iOS, Android and Windows as well as integration with game engines like Unity to easily build cross platform games.
Visual Studio 2015, Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online provide integrated DevOps services that enable teams to continuously deliver, continuously monitor and continuously learn so they can optimize their agility.
Visual Studio 2015 provides one-click integration of Application Insights for both server and client projects, making it seamless to get rich and immediate insights on the performance, availability and usage of your applications – both during development and in production.
