Windows 10: Visual Studio Preview Features page has a new look

Brink · Aug 5, 2019

The Preview Features page under Tools > Options > Environment has a new look! We introduced the Preview Features page so that you can easily find these capabilities and be able to control their enablement. The new layout provides more information and an opportunity to give feedback on the features. While these features are in development, you can disable any of these features if you run into issues. We also encourage you to provide feedback on the capabilities or any issues you find. Some features you may find on this page includes ones in early development that affect existing functionality, ones that are still evolving, and ones that are experiments that are meant to inform future development.

As we continue to iterate on these features, the list of preview features will fluctuate for each Visual Studio release as some features get added into the product and others are cut. You can learn more about the preview features available in each release in the release notes.

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Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visua...visual-studio/

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Brink · Aug 5, 2019

Visual Studio Roadmap Updates and Visual Studio 2019 Information

Yesterday, we covered What’s next for Visual Studio for Mac, and today we’ve updated our Visual Studio Roadmap so you can see the latest news about what we’re working on. We’re particularly excited to share this update since it includes information about the first preview of Visual Studio 2019, which we will make available by the end of this calendar year. We plan to have a generally available (GA) version of Visual Studio 2019 in the first half of 2019.

Be sure to check out the full roadmap for all the updates, but some notable improvements are:

A better performing and more reliable debugger, moving to an out-of-process 64-bit process.

Improved search accuracy for menus, commands, options, and installable components.

Visual Studio tooling for Windows Forms and WPF development on .NET Core 3.

As always, we are committed to making Visual Studio a great development environment: faster, more reliable, more productive for individuals and teams, and easier to get started with developing your code. Please continue to share your feedback with us so we can make the best tools for your development. You can send us your suggestions, ideas, and concerns through our Developer Community portal.

We will keep updating the roadmap as we deliver Visual Studio 2019 features iteratively. To try out the newest features and fixes, keep an eye on the Visual Studio Preview page and on this blog for announcements about the latest previews.

John Montgomery,
Director of Program Management for Visual Studio
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Source: Visual Studio Roadmap Updates and Visual Studio 2019 Information | The Visual Studio Blog

Brink · Aug 5, 2019

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 Preview 2 now released

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

Brink · Aug 5, 2019

New Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.7 Preview 1

Last week we released Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6 and Visual Studio for Mac version 7.4, and today we are releasing the first preview of the next minor update: Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7. We hope that you will use this Preview and share your feedback with us. To install, you can get it fresh from here or, if you already have a prior Preview installed, you can either click on the in-product notification or check for an update directly. Alternatively, if you have an Azure subscription, you can provision a virtual machine with this latest preview (starting tomorrow).

The top highlights of this Preview are described below and include productivity enhancements, better diagnostics, additional C++ development improvements, better management of Android and iOS environments, updated tooling for Universal Windows Platform and .NET Core projects, and an improved update experience. Please note that this is the first set of version 15.7 features; more goodness awaits in the next Preview. And as always, you can view the complete list of new features and details on how to enable them in the Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7 Preview release notes.

We appreciate your early adoption and feedback as it helps us ship the most high-quality tools to everyone in the Visual Studio community. Thank you for engaging in Visual Studio previews!

Productivity

UI Responsiveness: Performance and productivity are two areas we continually work on improving in Visual Studio. In Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7, we’re making some of the debugging windows asynchronous, which means that they will no longer block Visual Studio as they do work. This change will allow for faster stepping because you can continue interacting with Visual Studio without interruption. In this Preview, you should see the first of these improvements in the Threads, Callstack and Parallel Stacks windows, with more window improvements in future releases. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on the Visual Studio debugger: email L: vsdbgfb@microsoft.com.

Diagnostics

Snapshot Debugging: The Visual Studio Snapshot Debugger can now be launched from the Debug -> Attach Snapshot Debugger menu item. The snapshot debugger in Visual Studio enables you to diagnose and debug issues your Azure Web Applications without impacting the availability of the application. You can learn more about the Visual Studio Snapshot debugger through our docs.

IntelliTrace Events and Snapshots for .NET Core: IntelliTrace’s new step-back debugging feature, first shipped in Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5, is now supported for debugging .NET Core applications. The feature automatically takes a snapshot of your application on each breakpoint and debugger step, enabling you to go back to a previous breakpoint or step and view the state of the application as it was in the past. To enable this feature, go to Tools > Options > IntelliTrace settings > and select ‘IntelliTrace events and snapshots’. IntelliTrace step-back is a Visual Studio Enterprise feature available on Windows 10 Anniversary Update or above for debugging .NET applications.

C++ Development

C++ Standards Conformance: In this Preview, we extended template argument deduction for functions to constructors of template classes – when you construct a class template you no longer have to specify the arguments.

Code Analysis: C++ Core Check is now part of the default toolset for native code analysis. Whenever code analysis is executed over a project, a subset of rules is enabled from C++ Core Check in addition to default recommended rules.

Linux project properties: We added parallel compilation support for Linux projects, which may significantly improve build times; this can be enabled via Property Pages > C/C++ > Max Number of Parallel Compilation Jobs. We also added the “Public Project Include Directories” Linux project property to improve consumption of includes from project-to-project references in Linux solutions.

Compiler throughput: We’ve made changes in fastlink PDBs to reduce in-heap memory consumption by 30%. These changes reduce the time to hit the first breakpoint when debugging and makes single-stepping significantly faster. These changes also eliminate a major cause of out-of-memory crashes when debugging large projects.

ClangFormat: ClangFormat support for C++ developers was added to the IDE. Like with EditorConfig, you can use ClangFormat to automatically style and format your code as you type, in a way that can be enforced across your development team.

Universal Windows Platform Development

We have included the Windows 10 Insider Preview SDK, Build 17110 as an optional component associated with the Universal Windows Platform workload. We have also added support for generating Windows Machine Learning class wrappers for an ONNX file that is added to a UWP project. Currently, both components are optional but will be included by default in future preview releases.

.NET Mobile Development

Figuring out what Android SDKs to install for mobile development can be time consuming. Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7 adds a new Android SDK manager that takes the guesswork out of managing Android SDK installations. When opening a project for which you don’t have SDKs installed to build it, a notice will appear to help you download the required SDKs. After hitting “Download & Install” and accepting the relevant license agreement, the correct SDKs will automatically be installed in the background for you.

We are also making provisioning iOS devices for development easier. In Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7, we’re replacing requesting a development certificate, generating a signing key, adding a device in the Developer Center, and creating a provisioning profile with a single button. All the heavy lifting of provisioning an iOS device is handled for you in less than 30 seconds.

ASP.Net and Web Development

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7, currently in preview, is the recommended version of Visual Studio to use with .NET Core 2.1, which is also currently in preview. .NET Core 2.1 has a bunch of new features like a new managed socket implementation and various improvements like better support for HTTPS. It doesn’t matter which you install first, either way Visual Studio 15.7 will find .NET Core 2.1 and offer it as an option.

Acquisition

The update experience is now more streamlined than ever in Visual Studio 2017. The yellow notification flag in the upper right-hand corner of the IDE will still notify you when an update is available, but you can now also initiate your own update check by going to Help -> Check for Updates. After you save your work and choose “Update Now”, Visual Studio will automatically apply the update and then reopen back where you left.

This new update experience is just the beginning of our investments in this area, and we’d love to hear your feedback in this space, particularly about how and when you want to apply updates. Please share your ideas with us via the Update Survey.

Try out the Preview today!

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 a virtual machine of this preview (starting tomorrow). 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).

Christine Ruana,
Principal Program Manager, Visual Studio
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Source: Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.7 Preview 1 | The Visual Studio Blog

Windows 10: Visual Studio Preview Features page has a new look

Visual Studio Preview Features page has a new look

Visual Studio Preview Features page has a new look

Visual Studio Preview Features page has a new look

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