Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 RC

Visual Studio

March 3rd, 2016

Today we released the next set of reliability and performance improvements in Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 RC, which also addresses issues that we hear from your continued feedback.

Building on what we announced with the CTP release, here’s what you’ll find in Update 2 RC:

Issues we’ve fixed: Errors in the NuGet Package Manager Console that failed with “A task was canceled.” Crashes due to null and/or invalid pointer reads. Crashes some customers have encountered when opening a solution. Reduced licensing failures and more actionable information when failures occur. C++ projects load faster with improvements in UI delays. Promotion of MSBuild warning MSB3644 (“The reference assemblies for framework {0} were not found”) to error status so incorrect target frameworks that give rise to this error will break a build. Correction of problems in Visual Studio with ASP.NET after installing Update 2 CTP.

C/C++ runtime library performance: we’ve improved the performance of a number of common operations. For example, extracting floating point numbers with iostreams is up to nineteen times faster. Certain string operations are also faster, especially std::string::replace when replacing same-sized substrings. Give it a try and let us know if you notice a difference.

As with the CTP, we’ve continued to ship additional features as covered fully in the release notes, such as NuGet 3.4 and C#/Visual Basic refactoring to make methods synchronous. A couple of others include:

Visual Studio now shows Git SCC status in the status bar, and jumping to Changes, Sync, and Connect pages are just a single click away. This is all extensible by third party SCC providers.

Visual Studio now supports consuming TextMate snippets with IntelliSense completion by placing tmSnippet files into a snippet folder.

Improvements to the Application Insights search experience with the ability to jump to the code where a telemetry event was emitting, a search for related items, and a new experience to log data from apps.

Again, check the Description of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 RC for all the details.

We’ve also released Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2 RC 2 today. You can see what’s new there in the TFS Update 2 RC 2 release notes.

As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Send Feedback option (Send a Smile) in Visual Studio. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.