Visual Studio 2015 CTP6 released

Following the already established rhythm of updates, the development team is pleased to present the sixth preliminary release of Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 . In addition to this, we also prepared an update for Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP . Both updates you can download now. If you are not able to install pre-release versions of the products, but you would like to get acquainted with the new products, we also prepared ready virtual machines in the Azure cloud . Details about the updates that have been included in these preliminary releases can be found in the Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP Release Notes and Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 Release Notes .

Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6

After CTP 5 was released, we saw a surge of negative feedback through the built-in feedback mechanism Send-a-Smile. This was primarily due to some really painful problems, including blocking PDB files, which affected many users.

The truth is that our team wants to provide you with the results of our work as soon as possible and you could make your feedback, thereby making it clear what works and what doesn't. Finding the right balance between several factors, first of all, the speed of updates, team performance, the number of new features and quality. Based on this, we plan that the updates will have some level of quality, which, unfortunately, for CTP 5 turned out to be lower than expected.

We want to say many thanks to those who tried CTP 5 and gave their feedback. In the update CTP 6, we took into account all the wishes, and you will see a better and more stable release.

Also in CTP 6 entered a number of new features with which we are happy to acquaint you.



Single Sign In . One of the reviews that we constantly received from our users is that developers using many Microsoft services, such as Azure, Windows Store, MSDN subscriptions, and Visual Studio Online, are forced to frequently enter their credentials. We continue to work on this part of the functionality of Visual Studio and in CTP 6, these capabilities go to a new level. Now, the amount of input of credentials is significantly reduced, and most likely, after the first input, your credentials will be used to work with other services, if they are registered for the same account.

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New ASP features . NET . The Web development team continues to improve ASP.NET 5. In CTP 6, you will see improvements in the performance of the ASP.NET execution kernel, changes in the New Web Project dialog settings, IntelliSence updates for the JSON configuration files, as well as updating the package manager functions for bower, NPM, NuGet. You can learn more about these features from a note about ASP.NET updates included in this update.



Xamarin Integration Improvements . This update includes new integration features of the Xamarin platform and Visual Studio. In particular, it is now possible to develop libraries in the C ++ language for Android projects. In more detail about these features you can learn from the note how to develop native Xamarin Android applications . In addition, when installing Visual Studio, the configuration of the Xamarin component is simplified.



Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova . Over the past few releases, we have received feedback related to the number of devices on which it is possible to debug Apache Cordova applications. In addition to supporting Android 4.4, Android 4.3, jsHybugger, iOS 6,7,8, Windows Store 8.1, CTP 6 also included support for Windows Phone 8.1:



You can set breakpoints, view variable values, use the console to evaluate expressions, and perform other debugging operations on the Windows Phone 8.1 platform in an emulator or a real device. More details can be found in the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova note.



CodeLens . Thanks to CodeLens technology, you can find out more details about your code in the form of concise metrics and messages, while remaining focused on the main task - editing the code of your application. Along with this update, it was possible to see the version information for a file located in the Git repository for C ++, SQL and JavaScript code. If you are using TFS in addition, you will additionally be able to view information about the association of sections of your code with tasks and errors.





Architectural tools . In reviews of previous versions of the implementation of the Code Maps toolkit, complexity of use was noted. The new release improved the responsiveness of the Code Maps toolbox interface, simplified the Architecture menu, and improved the experience of using filtering tools. The initial construction of a code map for a project now takes much less time and allows grouping information based on folders located in a project in addition to the build mode based on assemblies. More details about this tool can be found in the improvements in Code Maps in CTP 5 .





NuGet . Together with CTP6, developers will receive an update to the package and component management toolkit. Basically, these improvements affected the interface part of managing packages, searching for suitable packages and updating them.

XAML UI Debugging . Visual Studio has the ability to view the DOM tree for HTML projects in detail for several releases, and this tool is a powerful tool in developing the HTML interface. Many of our users have asked us about similar XAML tools. Now this opportunity has appeared, and you can visualize the XAML tree, see the property and attribute values ​​for the XAML nodes, and fully debug the XAML interface. You will also be able to view and modify DependencyProperty objects. You can learn more about these features from the New UI Debugging Tools for XAML note.





In CTP 6, the XAML tree view tooling works only for desktop WPF projects. Unfortunately, applications for the Windows store are not yet supported, but the Visual Studio development team is already working on this feature.

Debugging NET code . CTP 6 improves debugging experience in various aspects. First of all, we improved the performance of the debugger in the case of calls to third libraries that generate a lot of exceptional situations during the debugging process. For more information about these improvements, see the Performance Improvement When Debugging .NET Code With Visual Studio 2015 . Improvements to the Edit & Continue mode have also been made, in particular, new changes have been added that are absent in previous releases, in particular for iterators and async await operations. Also added is the ability to “on the fly”, during debugging, make changes to some types of data, such as delegates, interfaces, and enumerations. For more information about these features, see C # Edit and Continue .



Also in CTP 6 the Make Object ID command reappeared which was absent for some time in previous releases. The Make Object ID mechanism allows you to assign a marker (tag) to a specific instance of an object during a debugging session, and then track its state during debugging even if you switch to another context that lacks the scope of this object. This allows you to view the value of object variables and how these values ​​change throughout the lifetime of this instance. Now you can again use the $ id syntax for the reference of these objects in the Watch and Immediate window, as well as set conditional breakpoints.

In addition to everything, the interface of the familiar to many tool of the configuration of exceptions was updated, which is now called in the menu Debug-Windows-.Exception Settings. As you have probably understood, now this is a modeless window, which you can arrange along with the rest of the windows associated with debugging. For more on this, see the How To use the Exception Settings Tool Window.





Visual Studio Emulator for Android . For many developers, the good news was that the high-performance Android emulator based on Hyper-V technology was integrated into Visual Studio 2015. Update CTP6 includes a number of new features, in particular, support for debugging applications built on the SDK Lollipop (API Level 21), support for OpenGL ES, simulation of multiple touches (multitouch), and camera simulation. You can learn more about these features from the New features in Visual Studio Emulator for Android .







Feedback . As usual, we are looking forward to your feedback and ideas about Visual Studio on the UserVoice site, this is a unique opportunity to directly influence what will be implemented in the product. Don't forget to also use the simplest feedback tool built into Visual Studio 2015 itself — the Send-a-Smile and Send-a-Frowun buttons . If you find a serious problem and you have time to describe it in detail, use the Visual Studio Connect website.