Sunday, July 26, 2015

Current state of Visual Studio releases [July 2015]

Hi my blog readers! I know, this blog installment should be out at before 24th July, but there were some exciting news to tell!

This is the fourth installment of Visual Studio releases update. In this installment, the updates are not so much like previous (on May 2015) but it’s very worthy to know!

These are the updates:

  • Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2015 RC2 release
  • Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 release
  • Visual Studio 2015 release

Now let’s talk about those releases!

Visual Studio 2015 RTM

Yes, Visual Studio 2015 has been released on 20th Jluy! I have described the what’s new on Visual Studio 2015 RC on the previous Visual Studio updates, now the RTM add this nice additions:

  • New support for high resolution icon for VS extensibility. This means VSX icon will scale nicely on high resolution monitors. There’s also Nuget package of Visual Studio extensibility, so VSX updates are less dependent on the standalone installer of VS SDK (like VS SDK before VS 2015)
  • Support for TypeScript 1.5. This also means support for features in ECMA 6, the current standard of Javascript.
  • Improved user account management of Visual Studio Online account and Git, also provide switchable profiles. Sweet!
  • Improved user account management for Azure AD, including supports for multiple Azure AD
  • Diagnostic tool that supports debugging of LLDB, GDB that usually used on GNU compilers. Now this addition requires some deep dive explanation, I’ll try to explain this on separate blog post after this Smile
  • Bing powered compiler help. Honestly, I haven’t tried this yet but I’ll try to tell my experience on this later
  • … and many more!

More detailed description is available at: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/07/20/visual-studio-2015-and-visual-studio-2013-update-5-released.aspx and also specifically at: https://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2015-vs

Also there are videos to watch at the launch of Visual Studio 2015: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual-Studio/Visual-Studio-2015-Final-Release-Event

I encourage you to check those videos!

Visual Studio 2013 Update 5

Not much is new on this release, but these are the most notable additions:

  • support for Team Project renaming, including sync with local workspace. Sweet!
  • Additional query token of “current iteration”
  • Cloud based load testing. Sweet!! This feature is very worthy to have, as it’s easier to have load test in cloud instead of playing around with on premises load test.

For more information on VS 2013 Update 5, visit VS 2013 Update 5 release notes: https://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2013-update5-vs

To download VS 2013 Update 5, go here: https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs

 

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2015 RC2

Finally, Team Foundation Server 2015 (a.k.a. TFS 2015) is not just feature complete, but it’s nearing RTM release!

From Brian Harry blog post:

Our plan had been that the Release Candidate we shipped at the end of April would be our last public pre-release and that mid-July would be our RTM date.  About a week ago, I made the decision to change the plan.  Instead, we are shipping a “Release Candidate 2” now and will RTM as soon as we are ready after that.

This means TFS 2015 is not released at the same time of Visual Studio 2015 and it’ll be definitely released after Visual Studio 2015 RTM.

One thing for sure is that the support for team project rename is available on this TFS 2015 RC2, and it works the same as in VS 2013 Update 5.

To download TFS 2015 RC2, visit: https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs

But by the time TFS 2015 RTM released, the download will be replaced by RTM version of TFS 2015.