Microsoft announced that the next major release of its flagship developer toolset, Visual Studio 2015, will be available for download on July 20.
That means that less than three months since releasing Visual Studio 2015 Release Candidate (RC), Microsoft will deliver the next version of Visual Studio for developers. Microsoft released Visual Studio 2015 RC on April 29 at its Build 2015 developer conference in San Francisco.
The final releases of Visual Studio 2015, Team Foundation Server 2015 and .NET 4.6 will be available for download on July 20. To celebrate the release, Microsoft will be hosting a Visual Studio 2015 Final Release Event on July 20 at 11:30 a.m. EDT.
The event will help developers learn about the new features and technologies coming with the new release. Developers will be able to engage in live, interactive Q&A sessions with the Visual Studio engineering team. They also will be able to take deep-dives into technical details covered in over 60 on-demand video sessions. Plus, the event will feature the Visual Studio developer team creating an end-to-end solution for an open-source project, leveraging the newest tools and technologies, Microsoft said.
“Visual Studio 2015 is a big release,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division, in a blog post announcing the ship date. “We are opening up Visual Studio to developers targeting new platforms—from cross-platform mobile development targeting iOS, Android and Windows, to game development targeting Unity, Unreal, Cocos and more. At the same time, Visual Studio 2015 redefines developer productivity with proactive diagnostics tooling and the new Rolsyn language services for C# and VB. And together, Visual Studio 2015, Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online help teams to embrace DevOps with great agile backlog management, Azure cloud tooling, hosted continuous integration, and Application Insights across all the components of your application.”
At Build 2015 Microsoft made Visual Studio 2015 Release Candidate available for download, with a go-live license to enable developers to take Visual Studio 2015 into production.
For developers targeting the Windows ecosystem, Visual Studio 2015 RC provides tools for building apps and games for the Universal Windows Platform that run across all Windows 10 devices, including phones, tablets, PCs, Xbox, the Internet of things (IoT) and HoloLens. There are new UI debugging tools, an improved XAML designer and enhanced profiling and debugging features.
For mobile developers, Visual Studio 2015 includes tools for building cross-platform apps that run on all of today’s popular mobile platforms, including Android, iOS and Windows. With Visual Studio, developers can target those platforms using Apache Cordova, Xamarin or C++. And for Web and server development, Visual Studio continues to provide many choices for application development with tooling for Python or Node.js, and .NET options with languages such as C#, Visual Basic or F#.
In addition to new platform support, Visual Studio 2015 brings dozens of new productivity and diagnostics features to developers. The list of improvements include the new Diagnostics Tools window that provides on-by-default access to key performance and memory usage information during normal debug sessions, giving users insights into application performance earlier in the development cycle.
The final release of Visual Studio 2015 will be available in time for Windows 10, which is slated for release on July 29.