Microsoft today officially announced the general availability of the integrated development environment, Visual Studio 2017. The release comes as part of the 20th Anniversary of Visual Studio and brings several key areas of improvement to make the experience faster, more collaborative, and more productive.
Leading off the improvements in Visual Studio 2017 is a brand-new installation experience that is lightweight and modular. According to Julia Liuson, Corporate Vice President of Visual Studio, multiple enhancements were also made to improve Visual Studio performance across the board, and to make Visual Studio 2017 start up to 3 times faster than Visual Studio 2015. Additionally, Visual Studio 2017 has new features that allow development teams to easily adopt modern DevOps practices and collaborate to react to market changes faster and continuously.
You can have a short burst look at some of the new features below, or head to this blog post published by John Montgomery, the Director of Program Management at Visual Studio to check out all the details on what’s new.
- Enhanced Navigation. Visual Studio 2017 dramatically improves code navigation, from “Go to All” to Find All References to Indent Guides. For example, Find All References used to display its search results as a flat list in the Results Window. Visual Studio 2017 colorizes the results and provides custom grouping, sorting, filtering, and searching to help you rapidly home in on the specific reference you were looking for.
- Linux support for C++. Visual C++ for Linux Development is a popular extension which is now part of Visual Studio 2017.
- Load files without needing a solution. One request we heard from customers was to be able to edit files without needing to open a project or solution. We listened and are happy to bring you a solution (wordplay mildly intended): in Visual Studio 2017, you can open and work on any file for a long list of languages
- IntelliSense filtering. IntelliSense now provides filters to quickly narrow down that member you’ve been looking for. Filtering helps you get to what you need without having to wade through many, many types to get to it
- Language improvements: refactorings, style analyzers, and more. There’s more here than we can easily fit into a short paragraph. We’ve added new C# language refactoring commands that help you modernize your code to the latest standard.
- CMake support for C++. Support for CMake is now available in Visual Studio 2017. You can start coding by directly loading your CMake projects in Visual Studio
Other key areas of improvements in Visual studio 2017 include 5-Star Mobile Applications, Cloud Development, DevOps, and The Visual Studio Ecosystem. You can download Visual Studio 2017 now, and even install it along side Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio 2013, and Visual Studio 2015, though it can’t can’t run side by side with an RC or preview version of Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio 15.
