Announcing Visual Studio 2017 General Availability… and more

Julia

March 7th, 2017

Now is an exciting time to work with developer tools. With a 25% increase in monthly active users of Visual Studio, 1.3 million active monthly users of Visual Studio Code, and a two-fold increase in active users of our Mac IDEs, I think our customers are excited too.

Since we released the Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate, we’ve had nearly 700,000 downloads! We’ve been busy taking customer feedback and enhancing the user experience to deliver the most powerful and productive version of Visual Studio yet. We’ve also been fine-tuning the Visual Studio family of tools. In November, we introduced previews of Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio Mobile Center and made Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2017 generally available.

Now, the day that we have been working toward is here. I am excited to share that Visual Studio 2017 is generally available today. I encourage all of you to download Visual Studio 2017 today! We are also delivering updates across the Visual Studio product family, and adding new value for Visual Studio subscribers and Visual Studio Dev Essentials members.

Visual Studio 2017: The Most Productive Version Yet

With Visual Studio 2017, we’ve invested in several key areas – refining the fundamentals

Cloud and mobile development were top of mind as we built Visual Studio 2017. For streamlined cloud development, built-in tools provide integration with all your .NET Core, Azure applications, microservices, Docker containers, and more. It is easier than ever to build and deploy applications and services to Azure, directly from the IDE. Visual Studio 2017 with Xamarin make it faster for you to create mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows through updates like advanced debugging and profiling tools.

We also heard loud and clear that Visual Studio needs to be faster and leaner, even as applications and projects get larger. So we built a brand-new installation experience that is lightweight and modular. We also made multiple enhancements to improve Visual Studio performance across the board. Visual Studio 2017 also has new features that allow development teams to easily adopt modern DevOps practices and collaborate to react to market changes faster and continuously. To extend developers’ ability to incorporate their databases into DevOps, accelerating release cycles, Redgate Data Tools are now included in Visual Studio Enterprise 2017.

I hope that you’ll download Visual Studio 2017, try it out, and let us know what you think. You can also learn more on John Montgomery’s post covering all that’s new in Visual Studio 2017.

With 5 million Visual Studio Team Services registered users and a two-fold increase in downloads of our Mac IDEs over the past six months, we are seeing customers realize the potential of the full Visual Studio family. Today, we’re bringing the next wave of updates with Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 1, Visual Studio for Mac Preview 4, and updates to the Visual Studio Mobile Center Preview.

Visual Studio for Mac Preview 4 . Visual Studio for Mac is our IDE, made for Mac to build mobile, cloud, and macOS Since the introduction at Connect(); mid-November, the team has been busy and added updated .NET Core project support, NuGet and mobile tooling improvements, and implemented many bug fixes and performance optimizations. You can read more about Visual Studio for Mac in Miguel’s blog post where you can give it a try! Please continue to share feedback as we shape the product.

. Visual Studio for Mac is our IDE, made for Mac to build mobile, cloud, and macOS Since the introduction at Connect(); mid-November, the team has been busy and added updated .NET Core project support, NuGet and mobile tooling improvements, and implemented many bug fixes and performance optimizations. You can read more about Visual Studio for Mac in Miguel’s blog post where you can give it a try! Please continue to share feedback as we shape the product. Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 1 available . Today, we are releasing Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 1, the collaboration platform for every developer. Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 1 adds value to on-premises customers, including a new process template managing experience, npm support in package management, additional repository permission management, pull request improvements, test impact analysis, branch policy improvements, and a personalized home . For more information on what’s new in Team Foundation Server 2017, check out Brian Harry’s blog.

. Today, we are releasing Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 1, the collaboration platform for every developer. Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 1 adds value to on-premises customers, including a new process template managing experience, npm support in package management, additional repository permission management, pull request improvements, test impact analysis, branch policy improvements, and a personalized home . For more information on what’s new in Team Foundation Server 2017, check out Brian Harry’s blog. Visual Studio Mobile Center preview updates. Mobile Center now has expanded support for mobile apps beyond Swift, ObjectiveC, and Java, to include support for mobile apps built with Xamarin and React Native as well as enhanced analytics. You can try the Visual Studio Mobile Center Preview today for free by going here.

With the release of Visual Studio 2017, we are bringing all-new benefits for Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers and Dev Essentials members. The Enterprise DevOps Accelerator offer brings organization everything they need to implement DevOps at scale and modernize their toolchain, including Visual Studio Enterprise, continuous deployment services with continuous integration (CI) and cloud-based load testing, beta distribution through HockeyApp, a discount on Azure compute resources, and on-site expert DevOps coaching. Find more information here. Further, Visual Studio subscribers and Dev Essentials members can log in to their respective portals for additional training and support offers from Microsoft and our partners.

We hope that you’re as excited about Visual Studio 2017 as we are. Make sure to download today keep the feedback coming.