8 ms·

Announcing Visual Studio “15” Preview 5

88 points by vyrotek 10y ago

buckbova 10y ago
Awesome. It takes so long to load vs 2015 and if I want to have two or three instances open simultaneously it absolutely kills my machine. Can't wait for this to come to the official release.
radix07 10y ago
If this make VS significantly faster and lighter, it might be the only thing keeping me from using it full time for Python development (that and Linux systems). It might actually be one of the best IDE's out there for Python. Autocomplete just works, vim bindings, debugging/stepping through code is easy as pie, pip and virtual environments all integrated... https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/python/ https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/python/
- frozenport 10y ago
  I prefer PyCharm because it also checks coding style.
- devereaux 10y ago
  Then why don't you use Visual Studio on Linux? Personally, that's what I do: Visual Studio Express 2010 for C# already works beautifully on my debian Jessie if you don't use dual screens. I have to look at 2015 or the regular ("Pro") version of previous versions of Visual Studio, but there should be nothing unfixable. By the way, if some good soul from Microsoft reads this and has a license to spare for Visual Studio Pro 2010, I'd be happy to check it works just as well :-) I have Microsoft Imagine but for some reason they don't give license for old version of VS If you want to try Visual Studio Express 2010 C# with wine, my recipe is just below. (I have to submit it to the winetrick team one day) If you want to use external dlls, don't forget to start Visual Studio with the prefix override WINEDLLOVERRIDES=fusion=n,ngen=n wine C:\....\VCSE.exe ###### Devereaux recipe for VS2010 C# on wine 1.8 # basics winetricks windowscodecs corefonts winetricks dotnet20 dotnet40 # To download prerequisites ; to make the properies tab work ; to help some tools winetricks winhttp gdiplus mfc42 # To view help files winetricks ie8_kb2936068 # Then simply install from publically availble ISO: # download.microsoft.com/download/1/E/5/1E5F1C0A-0D5B-426A-A603-1798B951DDAE/VS2010Express1.iso wine /mnt/VCSExpress/Setup.exe # NB: Refuse Silverlight and SQL as it may fail. # Then if you want, you can install SP1 from publically available ISO: # download.microsoft.com/download/E/B/A/EBA0A152-F426-47E6-9E3F-EFB686E3CA20/VS2010SP1dvd1.iso wine /mnt/Setup.exe /passive # NB: (must be passive, otherwise the splashscreen crashes)
  - radix07 10y ago
    Stuff like this is why I still can't bring myself to use Linux as my main development machine. That and some special tools that only work in Windows. Lately however I have been developing like a hipster using Vim for all of my Python stuff.
    - devereaux 10y ago
      I understand your point, it seems complicated. But stuff like this is why I use Linux as my main development machine. I have a reproductible process, and a full and independant installation of every piece of software living in a ~/.wine-whatever directory - here .wine-visualstudio2010 If anything happens to my installation, I can either unpack a tarball of this directory (in a known-to-be-working state) on another machine, or rerun an automated version of my recipe and have whatever Windows software ready in a matter of minutes, automatically. Laptops break, bad things happens. It can be a catastrophy when your time is tight. Personally, I don't have time to spare to sit through an installation process, and dependencies, and click on EULA, etc. So I want things to work reliably, even if the initial setup takes a bit longer. I love Microsoft software, but Windows is too fragile. I have a Windows partition and even a dedicated Windows machine. They usually work beautifully. ConEmu is so much better than all the X terminals I know. MSYS and bash from git are great development environments. I just don't want to depend on Windows for anything too serious.
      - radix07 10y ago
        I hear ya, everyone has their ways that work for them. Once I see wine come up, I usually start to glaze over. Although honestly I still haven't given wine a fair try yet. Don't get me wrong I love Linux and really wish I could use it as my main machine, but there are just some tools and interfaces I have to use on Windows since I do some hardware work as well with proprietary tools and all their own EULAs.. However the more I have been getting into web development lately the more Windows has become a pain to use for some tools and libraries. So I just use VMs, Rasperry Pi's and pretend occasionally. Tried Cygwin for awhile, but it just not the same. Conemu definitely rocks! However I somehow managed to merge the Windows Terminal and Cygwin in the same terminal by default which I have been unable to figure out... But at least I can use ls/dir interchangeably now, so I don't see it as a bad thing.
- saboot 10y ago
  I really want to like the PVTS stuff, but I miss the great documentation display that Spyder offers https://pythonhosted.org/spyder/help.html https://pythonhosted.org/spyder/help.html In PVTS I'm constantly looking on the web at the NumPy docs at what a quick ctrl+I gives me in Spyder.
neppo 10y ago
> Improved speed of Git source control operations by using git.exe Can someone elaborate on this, how was it implemented in previous versions?
- sandyarmstrong 10y ago
  Presumably it was previous using libgit2 or libgit2sharp. In fact, the README at https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 says: libgit2 is already very usable and is being used in production for many applications including the GitHub.com site, in Plastic SCM and also powering Microsoft's Visual Studio tools for Git.
sremani 10y ago
Is Visual Studio "15" using any parts of Linux subsystem on Windows for targeting or testing? Much interested if there is something interesting going on that end.
rajeemcariazo 10y ago
In my experience, Visual Studio 2013 is better than Visual Studio 2015 when working on ASP.NET. I get many errors in Razor files when on VS2015. All errors disappear when I clean and rebuild the whole project. I hope it gets better on the next version of Visual Studio.
- UK-AL 10y ago
  Err how old is your version MVC your using. Could be they depreciated it?
  - rajeemcariazo 10y ago
    i use ASP.NET MVC 5
- wvenable 10y ago
  I also found in some cases certain design-time errors go away by closing and re-opening Visual Studio. I used to pull my hair out trying to fix those errors; now if I get an error I don't understand it's a clean/rebuild cycle first and a close/reopen second. I kind of feel VS is getting less stable as Microsoft embraces the packages-for-everything style that is pervasive in web development.
- daigoba66 10y ago
  Indeed. I think a lot of the ASP.NET tooling (particularly around Razor) was rewritten in Visual Studio 2015. There are ton of bugs and other annoyances (for example: https://github.com/aspnet/Tooling/issues/116 https://github.com/aspnet/Tooling/issues/116).
- jmkni 10y ago
  For VS 2013, there where a lot of great extensions for VS designed to improve the front end web development experience (ie. things like LESS, SASS, Typescript) and also nuget for managing client side JS/CSS libraries. These became deprecated when 2015 rolled around, as the advice became to use more industry standard tools (node, gulp, grunt, etc) to accomplish the same tasks. I understand the rationale, and use those tools now, but certain aspects are definitely more cumbersome now than they where a couple of years ago when you could just let VS take care of it.
dvcc 10y ago
Visual Studio really needs to drop the large but seldom release schedule. There are so many pieces that just need minor improvements, that must await for these gigantic day-to-install releases before they see light. Saying that, I absolutely love VS just wish they actually managed to fix the update/release process.
- platz 10y ago
  enterprise does not like the rolling-release model.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    They've been doing it for VS Code which is now my goto editor for anything not C++ or Java.
  - yuhong 10y ago
    Not to mention each new release of Visual C++ for example require a new CRT etc with different file names.
    - petters 10y ago
      I think they talked about this some time ago and that they were (slowly) moving away from new CRTs all the time.
    - anonymfus 10y ago
      >Starting with Visual Studio “14,” we will stop releasing new versions of the CRT with each release of Visual Studio. Whereas before we would have released msvcr140.dll in this forthcoming release, then msvcr150.dll in the next release, we will instead release one new CRT in Visual Studio “14” then update that version in-place in subsequent releases, maintaining backwards compatibility for existing programs. From this post: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2014/06/10/the-great-c-runtime-crt-refactoring/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2014/06/10/the-great...
      - 10y ago
canistr 10y ago
Run to Click. You no longer need to set a temporary breakpoint to skip ahead and stop on the line you desire. When stopped in the debugger, simply click the icon that appears next to the line of code your mouse is over. Your code will run and stop on that line the next time it is hit. This looks like a great feature.
- gokhan 10y ago
  FYI. You can right click on a line and "Run to Cursor" in vs2015 and older versions. Nice touch.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
30 seconds... 30. sigh. This just isn't something to be happy about.
- tclancy 10y ago
  >loading the solution for the entire .NET Compiler Platform “Roslyn” 30 seconds with Visual Studio ‘15’ compared to 60 seconds with Visual Studio 2015 A 50% performance improvement isn't something to be happy about? How quickly should it be doing the loading of that specific set of files?
  - DSteinmann 10y ago
    > How quickly should it be doing the loading of that specific set of files Sub 500ms? Read the solution, read each project file, read the first level of file and folder names in each project, then show the solution explorer. Anything else can go in a background thread which doesn't block building, running, or opening individual files. I would like to see where the other 29,500ms are going.
    - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      Precisely this. Crystal Reports used to (I don't even know if CR still exists, tbh) display each page of a report as it rendered it. This made the app very productive compared to every other reporting tool we tested (at the time). They all rendered ALL the pages before showing even the first. This is deplorable and anti-user. Visual Studio should read in all the files, restoring to open the ones I had open last time and allow me to start editing immediately while still loading the rest in the background. Also, Intellisense data should be cached, because if the load time of 30 seconds is because it's prepping that each time, that's a waste.
      - jboles 10y ago
        > Visual Studio should read in all the files, restoring to open the ones I had open last time and allow me to start editing immediately while still loading the rest in the background. It's already done this for a few versions -- a feature named 'asynchronous solution load'. You're able to open a file and start editing while the X hundreds of projects load. However if you do a Navigate To, Find In Files, etc. among other operations, you'll get the modal progress bar because those operations require having the entire solution parsed. But editing and other simple operations are available while the projects are loading (which takes up the bulk of the time). edit: more info about asynchronous solution load: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2013/10/14/asynchronous-solution-load-performance-improvements-in-visual-studio-2013/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2013/10/14/asy...

88 points by vyrotek 10y ago

Awesome. It takes so long to load vs 2015 and if I want to have two or three instances open simultaneously it absolutely kills my machine. Can't wait for this to come to the official release.

radix07 10y ago

If this make VS significantly faster and lighter, it might be the only thing keeping me from using it full time for Python development (that and Linux systems). It might actually be one of the best IDE's out there for Python. Autocomplete just works, vim bindings, debugging/stepping through code is easy as pie, pip and virtual environments all integrated... https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/python/ https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/python/

frozenport 10y ago
I prefer PyCharm because it also checks coding style.
devereaux 10y ago
Then why don't you use Visual Studio on Linux? Personally, that's what I do: Visual Studio Express 2010 for C# already works beautifully on my debian Jessie if you don't use dual screens. I have to look at 2015 or the regular ("Pro") version of previous versions of Visual Studio, but there should be nothing unfixable. By the way, if some good soul from Microsoft reads this and has a license to spare for Visual Studio Pro 2010, I'd be happy to check it works just as well :-) I have Microsoft Imagine but for some reason they don't give license for old version of VS If you want to try Visual Studio Express 2010 C# with wine, my recipe is just below. (I have to submit it to the winetrick team one day) If you want to use external dlls, don't forget to start Visual Studio with the prefix override WINEDLLOVERRIDES=fusion=n,ngen=n wine C:\....\VCSE.exe ###### Devereaux recipe for VS2010 C# on wine 1.8 # basics winetricks windowscodecs corefonts winetricks dotnet20 dotnet40 # To download prerequisites ; to make the properies tab work ; to help some tools winetricks winhttp gdiplus mfc42 # To view help files winetricks ie8_kb2936068 # Then simply install from publically availble ISO: # download.microsoft.com/download/1/E/5/1E5F1C0A-0D5B-426A-A603-1798B951DDAE/VS2010Express1.iso wine /mnt/VCSExpress/Setup.exe # NB: Refuse Silverlight and SQL as it may fail. # Then if you want, you can install SP1 from publically available ISO: # download.microsoft.com/download/E/B/A/EBA0A152-F426-47E6-9E3F-EFB686E3CA20/VS2010SP1dvd1.iso wine /mnt/Setup.exe /passive # NB: (must be passive, otherwise the splashscreen crashes)
- radix07 10y ago
  Stuff like this is why I still can't bring myself to use Linux as my main development machine. That and some special tools that only work in Windows. Lately however I have been developing like a hipster using Vim for all of my Python stuff.
  - devereaux 10y ago
    I understand your point, it seems complicated. But stuff like this is why I use Linux as my main development machine. I have a reproductible process, and a full and independant installation of every piece of software living in a ~/.wine-whatever directory - here .wine-visualstudio2010 If anything happens to my installation, I can either unpack a tarball of this directory (in a known-to-be-working state) on another machine, or rerun an automated version of my recipe and have whatever Windows software ready in a matter of minutes, automatically. Laptops break, bad things happens. It can be a catastrophy when your time is tight. Personally, I don't have time to spare to sit through an installation process, and dependencies, and click on EULA, etc. So I want things to work reliably, even if the initial setup takes a bit longer. I love Microsoft software, but Windows is too fragile. I have a Windows partition and even a dedicated Windows machine. They usually work beautifully. ConEmu is so much better than all the X terminals I know. MSYS and bash from git are great development environments. I just don't want to depend on Windows for anything too serious.
    - radix07 10y ago
      I hear ya, everyone has their ways that work for them. Once I see wine come up, I usually start to glaze over. Although honestly I still haven't given wine a fair try yet. Don't get me wrong I love Linux and really wish I could use it as my main machine, but there are just some tools and interfaces I have to use on Windows since I do some hardware work as well with proprietary tools and all their own EULAs.. However the more I have been getting into web development lately the more Windows has become a pain to use for some tools and libraries. So I just use VMs, Rasperry Pi's and pretend occasionally. Tried Cygwin for awhile, but it just not the same. Conemu definitely rocks! However I somehow managed to merge the Windows Terminal and Cygwin in the same terminal by default which I have been unable to figure out... But at least I can use ls/dir interchangeably now, so I don't see it as a bad thing.
saboot 10y ago
I really want to like the PVTS stuff, but I miss the great documentation display that Spyder offers https://pythonhosted.org/spyder/help.html https://pythonhosted.org/spyder/help.html In PVTS I'm constantly looking on the web at the NumPy docs at what a quick ctrl+I gives me in Spyder.

neppo 10y ago

> Improved speed of Git source control operations by using git.exe Can someone elaborate on this, how was it implemented in previous versions?

sandyarmstrong 10y ago
Presumably it was previous using libgit2 or libgit2sharp. In fact, the README at https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 says: libgit2 is already very usable and is being used in production for many applications including the GitHub.com site, in Plastic SCM and also powering Microsoft's Visual Studio tools for Git.

sremani 10y ago

Is Visual Studio "15" using any parts of Linux subsystem on Windows for targeting or testing? Much interested if there is something interesting going on that end.

rajeemcariazo 10y ago

In my experience, Visual Studio 2013 is better than Visual Studio 2015 when working on ASP.NET. I get many errors in Razor files when on VS2015. All errors disappear when I clean and rebuild the whole project. I hope it gets better on the next version of Visual Studio.

UK-AL 10y ago
Err how old is your version MVC your using. Could be they depreciated it?
- rajeemcariazo 10y ago
  i use ASP.NET MVC 5
wvenable 10y ago
I also found in some cases certain design-time errors go away by closing and re-opening Visual Studio. I used to pull my hair out trying to fix those errors; now if I get an error I don't understand it's a clean/rebuild cycle first and a close/reopen second. I kind of feel VS is getting less stable as Microsoft embraces the packages-for-everything style that is pervasive in web development.
daigoba66 10y ago
Indeed. I think a lot of the ASP.NET tooling (particularly around Razor) was rewritten in Visual Studio 2015. There are ton of bugs and other annoyances (for example: https://github.com/aspnet/Tooling/issues/116 https://github.com/aspnet/Tooling/issues/116).
jmkni 10y ago
For VS 2013, there where a lot of great extensions for VS designed to improve the front end web development experience (ie. things like LESS, SASS, Typescript) and also nuget for managing client side JS/CSS libraries. These became deprecated when 2015 rolled around, as the advice became to use more industry standard tools (node, gulp, grunt, etc) to accomplish the same tasks. I understand the rationale, and use those tools now, but certain aspects are definitely more cumbersome now than they where a couple of years ago when you could just let VS take care of it.

dvcc 10y ago

Visual Studio really needs to drop the large but seldom release schedule. There are so many pieces that just need minor improvements, that must await for these gigantic day-to-install releases before they see light. Saying that, I absolutely love VS just wish they actually managed to fix the update/release process.

platz 10y ago
enterprise does not like the rolling-release model.
- vvanders 10y ago
  They've been doing it for VS Code which is now my goto editor for anything not C++ or Java.
- yuhong 10y ago
  Not to mention each new release of Visual C++ for example require a new CRT etc with different file names.
  - petters 10y ago
    I think they talked about this some time ago and that they were (slowly) moving away from new CRTs all the time.
  - anonymfus 10y ago
    >Starting with Visual Studio “14,” we will stop releasing new versions of the CRT with each release of Visual Studio. Whereas before we would have released msvcr140.dll in this forthcoming release, then msvcr150.dll in the next release, we will instead release one new CRT in Visual Studio “14” then update that version in-place in subsequent releases, maintaining backwards compatibility for existing programs. From this post: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2014/06/10/the-great-c-runtime-crt-refactoring/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2014/06/10/the-great...
    - 10y ago

canistr 10y ago

Run to Click. You no longer need to set a temporary breakpoint to skip ahead and stop on the line you desire. When stopped in the debugger, simply click the icon that appears next to the line of code your mouse is over. Your code will run and stop on that line the next time it is hit. This looks like a great feature.

gokhan 10y ago
FYI. You can right click on a line and "Run to Cursor" in vs2015 and older versions. Nice touch.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

30 seconds... 30. sigh. This just isn't something to be happy about.

tclancy 10y ago
>loading the solution for the entire .NET Compiler Platform “Roslyn” 30 seconds with Visual Studio ‘15’ compared to 60 seconds with Visual Studio 2015 A 50% performance improvement isn't something to be happy about? How quickly should it be doing the loading of that specific set of files?
- DSteinmann 10y ago
  > How quickly should it be doing the loading of that specific set of files Sub 500ms? Read the solution, read each project file, read the first level of file and folder names in each project, then show the solution explorer. Anything else can go in a background thread which doesn't block building, running, or opening individual files. I would like to see where the other 29,500ms are going.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    Precisely this. Crystal Reports used to (I don't even know if CR still exists, tbh) display each page of a report as it rendered it. This made the app very productive compared to every other reporting tool we tested (at the time). They all rendered ALL the pages before showing even the first. This is deplorable and anti-user. Visual Studio should read in all the files, restoring to open the ones I had open last time and allow me to start editing immediately while still loading the rest in the background. Also, Intellisense data should be cached, because if the load time of 30 seconds is because it's prepping that each time, that's a waste.
    - jboles 10y ago
      > Visual Studio should read in all the files, restoring to open the ones I had open last time and allow me to start editing immediately while still loading the rest in the background. It's already done this for a few versions -- a feature named 'asynchronous solution load'. You're able to open a file and start editing while the X hundreds of projects load. However if you do a Navigate To, Find In Files, etc. among other operations, you'll get the modal progress bar because those operations require having the entire solution parsed. But editing and other simple operations are available while the projects are loading (which takes up the bulk of the time). edit: more info about asynchronous solution load: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2013/10/14/asynchronous-solution-load-performance-improvements-in-visual-studio-2013/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2013/10/14/asy...