Windows 10: Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 Preview 2 now released

Brink · Sep 12, 2018

Today, we are releasing the second preview of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9, and it can be downloaded here. This latest preview contains new features and improvements to Universal Windows Platform development, C++ debugging, and export installation settings. Read more in the feature highlight summary below and check out the Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 Preview 2 release notes for more details on all the new, exciting features contained in this Preview.

Universal Windows Platform Development

In Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 preview 2, we have a combination of new features and product enhancements for Universal Windows Platform developers. Read below to see what’s new!

Latest Windows 10 Insider Preview SDK: The most recent Windows 10 Insider Preview SDK (build 17754) is now included as an optional component for the Universal Windows Platform development workload. UWP developers can install this SDK to access the latest APIs available in the upcoming release of Windows 10.

MSIX Package Creation: You can now create .MSIX packages in Visual Studio either through the Universal Windows Platform packaging tooling or through the Windows Application Packaging Project template. To generate a .MSIX package, set your Minimum Version to the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview SDK (build 17754), and then follow the standard package creation workflow in Visual Studio. To learn more about .MSIX packaging, check out this Build talk.

F5 Performance Improvements: We have optimized our F5 (build and deploy) tooling for faster developer productivity with UWP development. These improvements will be most noticeable for developers that target a remote PC using Windows authentication; but, all other deployment types should see improved performance as well.

UWP XAML Designer Reliability: For developers building UWP applications with a target version of Fall Creators Update (build 16299) or higher, you should notice fewer XAML designer crashes. Specifically, when the designer tries to render controls that throw with catchable exceptions, the rendered control will be replaced with a fallback control rather than crashing the design surface. These fallback controls will have a yellow border (shown below) to indicate to developers that the control has been replaced.

Step Back in the C++ Debugger

In Preview 2, we’ve added “Step Back” for C++ developers targeting Windows. With this feature, you can now return to a previous state while debugging without having to restart the entire process. It’s installed, but set to “off” by default as part of the C++ workload. To enable it, go to Tools -> Options -> IntelliTrace and select the “IntelliTrace snapshots” option. This will enable snapshots for both Managed and Native code.

Once “Step Back” is enabled, you will see snapshots appear in the Events tab of the Diagnostic Tools Window when you are stepping through C++ code.

Clicking on any event will take you back to its respective snapshot. Or, you can simply use the Step Backward button on the debug command bar to go back in time. You can see “Step Back” in action in concurrence with “Step Over” in the gif below.

Acquisition

We’ve made it easier to keep your installation settings consistent across multiple installations of Visual Studio. You can now use the Visual Studio Installer to export a .vsconfig file for a given instance of Visual Studio. This file will contain information about the workloads and components you have installed. You can then import this file to add your workload and component selections to a new or existing installation of Visual Studio.

Try out the Preview

If you’re not familiar with Visual Studio Previews, take a moment to read the Visual Studio 2017 Release Rhythm. Remember that Visual Studio 2017 Previews can be installed side-by-side with other versions of Visual Studio and other installs of Visual Studio 2017 without adversely affecting either your machine or your productivity. Previews provide an opportunity for you to receive fixes faster and try out upcoming functionality before they become mainstream. Similarly, the Previews enable the Visual Studio engineering team to validate usage, incorporate suggestions, and detect flaws earlier in the development process. We are highly responsive to feedback coming in through the Previews and look forward to hearing from you.

Please get the Visual Studio Preview today, exercise your favorite workloads, and tell us what you think. If you have an Azure subscription, you can provision virtual machine of this preview. You can report issues to us via the Report a Problem tool in Visual Studio or you can share a suggestion on UserVoice. You’ll be able to track your issues in the Visual Studio Developer Community where you can ask questions and find answers. You can also engage with us and other Visual Studio developers through our Visual Studio conversation in the Gitter community (requires GitHub account). Thank you for using the Visual Studio Previews.

Written by: Angel Zhou
Program Manager, Visual Studio
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Source: Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 Preview 2 | The Visual Studio Blog

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Brink · Sep 12, 2018

Announcing Visual Studio 15 Preview 2

Last month, we released our first preview of the next version of Visual Studio. After listening to your feedback, we have fixed issues and improved experiences in this preview. Download Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 to get the latest. This is still a Preview and is unsupported, so please refrain from installing it on your production environments.

This preview like the previous one, lays groundwork for the next version of Visual Studio. We primarily focused on bug fixes and a few feature updates. New features include; making the account settings dialog more accessible to screen readers, diagnostics improvements to help track down focus related issues, Edit and Continue for XAML apps, and simplified debug configuration in Folder view. Preview 2 also includes the latest Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova Update 9 which supports Cordova 6.1.1.

The new light weight installer we introduced in Visual Studio “15” Preview is also available for Visual Studio “15” Preview 2. You can download Preview 2 with the new installer. Remember, this is an early preview so the installer doesn’t yet support all Visual Studio features. So if you want a fuller set of components, please install Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 directly without the lightweight installer. Detailed release notes for the new installer are available at Visual Studio 2017 15.8 Release Notes.

There is one breaking change I want to call out. The change is in how Visual Studio consumes templates and requires that you define templates in template manifest files. This change will not impact anyone in this release, but it is a heads up that templates not defined in template manifest files will stop working in the next Visual Studio “15” release. This change will only impact anyone who authors Visual Studio project templates. You can find out more about this breaking change on MSDN.

Check out the Visual Studio “15” Preview Release Notes and Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 Known Issues for the complete list of what’s available in Visual Studio “15” Preview 2.

As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Report a Problem option in Visual Studio. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.
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Source: Visual Studio Preview 2 | The Visual Studio Blog

Brink · Sep 12, 2018

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6 Preview 2 now available

In this article, you will find information regarding the current Preview release for Visual Studio 2017. Click the button to download the latest preview release.

Note This release is not "go-live" and not intended for use on production computers or for creating production code.
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Feedback

We’d love to hear from you! For issues, let us know via the Report a Problem option in the upper right-hand corner of either the installer or the Visual Studio IDE itself. The

icon is located in the upper right-hand corner. You can track your issues in the Visual Studio Developer Community, where you can ask questions and find answers. You can also make a product suggestion through UserVoice or get free installation help through our Live Chat support.

Need professional support right now? See available support options.

Release History

January 10, 2018 -- Visual Studio version 15.6 Preview 2

-- Read the Preview 2 blog post!

December 14, 2017 -- Visual Studio version 15.6 Preview 1.1

December 7, 2017 -- Visual Studio version 15.6 Preview 1 -- Read the Preview 1 blog post!

You can learn more about how we ship our releases and how to identify different versions in the Visual Studio 2017 Release Rhythm document.

Known Issues

Please refer to the Known Issues section.

Read more Visual Studio 2017 Preview Release Notes

Brink · Sep 12, 2018

Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.3 Preview

We recently released the third Preview of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 and we would love to get your feedback! We’ve been working hard to polish up some features, address some of the issues you’ve reported, and make meaningful improvements in the product’s fundamentals such as reliability, performance, and accessibility. For details of all the goodness contained in this Preview, check out the Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 Preview Release Notes. A few of the notable highlights include:

Continuous Delivery Tools can now automatically build and deploy NET or ASP.NET Core projects to Azure Web App Services. This means that developers can create and configure a CI Build Definition and a Release Definition for their solution on Visual Studio Team Services without leaving the Visual Studio IDE.

Increased visibility on extensions’ impact on Visual Studio reliability. Visual Studio has a rich ecosystem of tools and extensions that provide useful functionality to developers. But sometimes, extensions’ interactions with Visual Studio can have bugs. We already provide some diagnostics via an infobar that lets you know if an extension is slowing things down. Now, the diagnostic system has been extended to let you know if an extension may have been involved if ever VS terminates unexpectedly.

Lightweight solution load (LSL) has been extended to large C++ solutions, which means that these types of projects will load faster.

If you’re not familiar with Visual Studio Previews, please take a moment to read the brief Visual Studio 2017 Release Rhythm. Remember that Visual Studio 2017 Previews install side by side with released bits, so they should not impact your machine. Previews provide an opportunity for you to receive fixes faster and to try out upcoming functionality before it becomes mainstream. Similarly, the Previews enable the Visual Studio Engineering team to validate usage and detect flaws earlier in the development process. This means that we are highly attuned to feedback coming in through the Previews. It’s a virtuous win-win cycle.

Install the Visual Studio 2017 Preview today, exercise your favorite piece of functionality, and tell us what you think. You can log bugs via Report a Problem in the IDE or share a suggestion on UserVoice. You can track the bugs you log on the developer community portal.

Christine Ruana,
Principal Program Manager, Visual Studio
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Source: Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.3 Preview | The Visual Studio Blog

Windows 10: Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 Preview 2 now released

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 Preview 2 now released

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 Preview 2 now released

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 Preview 2 now released

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