Visual Studio “15” Preview 2

Visual Studio

May 10th, 2016

Last month, we released our first preview of the next version of Visual Studio. After listening to your feedback, we have fixed issues and improved experiences in this preview. Download Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 to get the latest. This is still a Preview and is unsupported, so please refrain from installing it on your production environments.

This preview like the previous one, lays groundwork for the next version of Visual Studio. We primarily focused on bug fixes and a few feature updates. New features include; making the account settings dialog more accessible to screen readers, diagnostics improvements to help track down focus related issues, Edit and Continue for XAML apps, and simplified debug configuration in Folder view. Preview 2 also includes the latest Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova Update 9 which supports Cordova 6.1.1.

The new light weight installer we introduced in Visual Studio “15” Preview is also available for Visual Studio “15” Preview 2. You can download Preview 2 with the new installer. Remember, this is an early preview so the installer doesn’t yet support all Visual Studio features. So if you want a fuller set of components, please install Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 directly without the lightweight installer. Detailed release notes for the new installer are available at https://aka.ms/vsnewinstallerreadme.

There is one breaking change I want to call out. The change is in how Visual Studio consumes templates and requires that you define templates in template manifest files. This change will not impact anyone in this release, but it is a heads up that templates not defined in template manifest files will stop working in the next Visual Studio “15” release. This change will only impact anyone who authors Visual Studio project templates. You can find out more about this breaking change on MSDN.

Check out the Visual Studio “15” Preview Release Notes and Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 Known Issues for the complete list of what’s available in Visual Studio “15” Preview 2.

As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Report a Problem option in Visual Studio. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.