Visual Studio 2015 and .NET Framework 4.6 have been released

On July 20th 2015, the new Visual Studio 2015 and .NET Framework 4.6 by Microsoft became available to download.

This release is a big step to bring the productivity of these products to any developer working on any kind of application, while delivering a new level of innovation in the productivity.

Visual Studio 2015 is an integrated development environment from Microsoft with a comprehensive collection of developer tools and services, used to create apps, as well as web sites and web services.

The Visual Studio family has expanded over the years:

• Visual Studio Community – a free for non-enterprise development, fully -featured, and extensible IDE for creating modern applications for Windows, Android, and iOS, as well as web applications and cloud services
• Visual Studio Online – services for teams to share code, track work, and ship software – for any language, all in a single package
• Visual Studio Code – refined code editor supporting cross-platform to build and debug modern web and cloud applications

Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 highlights

Innovation in productivity

• Debugging and Diagnostics – unified debugging and profiling into single Diagnostics Tool window; with PrefTips you can get performance information right in your code
• Code editing and Refactoring – C# and VB developers can use the new Roslyn-based tooling, including Light Bulbs that pro-actively suggest potential fixes or code refactoring tooling; with code analyzers it is possible to customize warnings and suggestions delivered inside the editor; added XAML editor
• Programming Languages – this new release includes the final version of C# 6 and Visual Basic 14 and improved support for C++ 11/14/17 together with TypeScript 1.5, F# 4.0 and tools for Python and dozens of other languages

Openness for Web, Cloud and Mobile Development

• Web and Cloud Development – besides .NET 4.6, there is as well ASP.NET 4.6 available, which adds support for HTTP/2 and C# features and the new Entity Framework 6.1.3. Tooling for web development offers HTML and CSS tooling with up to date standards support and JSON editor. Azure SDK provides one-click provisioning and deployment to Azure for web sites and cloud services. ASP .NET 5 is one of the most significant updates; it runs on the CoreCLR so it can be deployed to any platform whether Linux, Windows or Mac, offering improvements in rapid developments, cloud configuration, dependency management and composability
• Mobile Development – Visual Studio 2015 offers a variety range of cross-platform development tools for building applications targeting iOS, Windows and Android with a choice of languages. Rich web tooling, integrated debugging and support for the web UI frameworks provide the tools needed to build great mobile-ready web sites. Tools for Apache Cordova offer the usage of HTML, CSS and JavaScript (or TypeScript) to build cross-platform mobile applications that deploy to the consumer on enterprise store. Visual Studio Emulator for Android can be used for debugging and testing Android applications. By combining Visual Studio 2015 and Xamarin, the extension od .NET applications is possible to target iOS and Android. Cross-platform C++ development is also provided by Visual Studio 2015 for shared components targeting iOS, Android and Windows and as well integration with game engines like Unity

DevOps and Agility

• Planning – tools as Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online are critical for teams to track their work
• Develop and Test – Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online have introduced a new Pull Request code review experience for Git projects, enabling faster collaboration in the earlier development process
• Build and Release – brand new build system that provide simple web-based interface for configuring pluggable, cross-platform build workflows is offered by Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online
• Monitor and Learn – one-click integration of Application Insights for both server and client projects, provides immediate insight on the performance, availability and usage of the application – both during development and in production

Conclusion

Visual Studio 2015 and .NET Framework 4.6 are a big and exciting step for developer tools – combining new productivity for existing Visual Studio users with new platform support for developers targeting a wider range of platforms and programming models.

With the upcoming release of Windows 10 on July 29th 2015, it might be wise to install the new release of Visual Studio 2015 after installing the new version of Windows 10, if you plan to upgrade.

If you do not wish to upgrade to Visual Studio 2015, but rather stay with Visual Studio 2013, there are good news. On July 20th 2015, there was a new release of Update 5 for Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013.

Please note, that the Visual Studio 2013 RTM will only be supported for one year after this update, then it will be discontinued.