Last week, we announced that Microsoft shipped a preview of Visual Studio 15 during Build 2016. In addition to the language fixes and Debugger highlights, the new toolkit also boasts growth in power and capabilities with a lighter footprint, better customization, and quicker installation.
The Visual Studio Engineering team released a blog post today giving a more detailed explanation about the new installer’s capabilities. With the previous versions of Visual Studio, developers claimed that they found the tools bulky and filled with features that they never used. As a response, Visual Studio 15 focuses on features and tools that are packed into pre-defined bundles. These bundles are designed to get developers into production quickly and efficiently by providing core tools, frameworks, SDKs, dependencies, etc. that are needed for editing, building, debugging, and testing applications.
Currently, the preview installer has shipped with four bundles for developers: .Net desktop development, Game development with Unity, Python, and C++. After selecting the preferred bundles, the developing environment will be created in only a few minutes compared to the longer times in the past. Perhaps the most useful feature of the new installer is the convenient “Modify” option that will allow removing or adding more tool bundles with incredible ease.
The Visual Studio has assured that they intend to add more bundles over the coming months to support Universal Windows Apps, .Net web, and mobile development with Cordova, Xamarin, and C++ support. The product teams will not only be creating core requirement package bundles but add a set of recommended features and tools that will aid developers with their applications. In addition, some features such as specific versions of SDKs, diagnostic tools, git command line tools, etc. will be available for installation without bundles.
The team encourages developers to install the latest version of the Visual Studio 15 Preview Installer and provide feedback about their experiences. Let us know in the comments what you think about Visual Studio 15.
