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The newest release of Visual Studio for Mac, Version 7.6, is now available, featuring performance updates, bug fixes and new features that will give users more tools to complete their work.
Announced Aug. 20 in a post by Dominic Nahous, senior product manager for Visual Studio for Mac, the latest version focuses on improving product reliability and the code editing experience for users of Visual Studio.
Also getting attention in Version 7.6 are several fixes that improve the performance of the application’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE), where users edit, debug and build code before publishing their new apps, wrote Nahous.
In addition, support for Microsoft Azure is being expanded with new functions, while new templates are being added as well as the ability to publish a new function directly to Azure from within the IDE, he wrote. Azure functions allow users to quickly get up and running with a serverless function in just a few minutes.
“These new templates allow you to configure access rights, connection strings and any other binding properties that are required to configure the function,” wrote Nahous. “Another major part of the Azure functions workflow that we are introducing with this release is publishing of functions from Visual Studio for Mac to the Azure Portal.”
To publish a function, users can right-click on the project name and select Publish > Publish to Azure. Users will then be able to publish to an existing Azure App Service or use the publishing wizard to create a new one, he wrote.
Visual Studio’s code editor gets some important reliability improvements in Version 7.6, according to Nahous, including a bug fix for when Quick Fix menu items don’t display if source analysis is disabled, and a fix for a widely reported issue where tooltips would not disappear from the screen. Also repaired was an issue where IntelliSense seems to fail, resulting in red “squiggles” remaining in the code editor even though there were no errors.
For F# developers, Microsoft engineers also fixed IntelliSense to resolve an issue where developers could not use “.” for auto-completion, and also made improvements in JavaScript syntax highlighting.
Other notable bug fixes include an issue where the code editor became so slow as to become unusable, as well as an issue where Visual Studio became incredibly slow and suffered from serious performance lag, wrote Nahous. Also fixed was an issue where search results were not displayed and several nagging issues with the updater.
A wide range of other small fixes were made that improve startup time and reduce memory consumption of the IDE, according to the company.
Users can download the new release or update their existing install to the latest build available in the Stable channel.
Visual Studio for Mac is designed natively for Mac devices with the goal of optimizing developer workflow for the Mac.
Earlier in August, Microsoft also released the latest version 15.8 of its Visual Studio 2017 for Windows application, which included performance, productivity and bug fixes such as multi-caret editing improvements, support for TypeScript 3.0 and faster unit test execution.