Visual Studio “15” is the next big update to Microsoft’s primary set of development tools. Today, Microsoft released another update, Preview 4, bringing the new release that much closer to production.
Microsoft highlighted what’s new in Preview 4 at the Visual Studio Blog:
The highlight of this release is that nearly all of VS is running on the new setup engine, resulting in a smaller, faster and less impactful installation. The smallest install is less than 500 MB on disk (compared to 6GB in the previous release of Visual Studio). There are a couple of “workloads” that aren’t present yet, including .NET Core tooling and Azure tooling, but the rest of the existing VS 2015 feature set is available.
The streamlined installation isn’t the only thing that’s new to Preview 4. The Start Page experience is gaining some new features, including Open and Create functions being added to the Recent list and News feed. C++ support is being beefed up as well, as is the feedback systems.
For a more complete update on everything that’s new, head on over to the Visual Studio “15” Preview 4 release notes. There, you’ll find everything you want to know about the following short list of updates:
- New installation experience rolled out to all preview users
- Enhanced Visual Studio Feedback Workflow for improved follow-up and collaboration
- Enhanced Visual Studio IDE with a large selection of improvements
- Roaming Extension Manager to keep up with extensions across development environments
- Open Folder navigation functionality
- Lightweight Solution Load (Experimental) for faster solution load time and improved memory usage
- Syntax Colorization, Autocomplete, Snippet, and “Navigate To” Search support for a broader set of languages
Of course, there’s much more that’s new in this release, and so if you’re a developer looking forward to implementing Visual Studio “15,” you’ll want to go read up on everything that’s been added and improved in Preview 4. Let us know in the comments if you discover anything particularly helpful to your development workflow.
