This is a confusing announcement from Microsoft.<p>They are actually announcing a new product <i>lineup</i> (1) and not a new <i>release for actual download</i>. The article predicts that the actual release (RTM) will be in the summer. The current (beta) release is still CTP 6 which was already announced a few weeks ago.<p>I suppose this is a press release intended more for the corporate IT manager planning his purchasing budget (what SKU do I buy/upgrade) rather than developers to actually install and play with today.<p>(1) e.g. Premium and Ultimate editions will be merged into one Enterprise edition
You can now use "extensions" in the community edition and you can create whatever project you want, without installing 3 different versions of Visual Studio.<p>Which makes Visual Studio actually attractive for a community edition (the express edition is deprecated though - that's a good thing).
VS2015 seemed to be pretty much the same as VS2013, although my experience was limited to the enhanced project support for Apache Cordova.<p>Findings:<p>- There's a very bad (known) bug that renders the entire IDE unusable. If you attempt to modify the markup of certain databound elements (possibly others), an error message will pop up and the IDE will cease to function in a predictable manner<p>- The VS Android Emulator is great, but it needs a bit more work. For example, it modifies you network settings without notifying you (installs Virtual adapters). Now if something else modifies those settings, the Emulator will refuse to start. You have to poke around a bit with the Hyper-V manager to get things working again. They should have a "restore default settings" option. (My Emulator refuses to work now even after I removed and reinstalled it).<p>- The VS emulator would be better if it had a default "Shared" folder that could be used to transfer files between the device and host.<p>- You can't specify the port you want to run Ripple on. I believe they are planning on fixing this, but it's a big problem at the moment as VS will just choose randomly from 40 different ports, each time creating a new folder and recreating your local databases. This makes it hard to track down bugs, or continuing from a known state.<p>- Build support is very limited. You have to muck about with the project settings to do trivial things like redirecting output based on Project configuration<p>- The Javascript debugger needs work. It will sometimes break whenever a new Javascript file is loaded. Or it will break on lines where no breakpoints have been set, even though no (visible) error occurred.<p>Other than that the IDE seems more-or-less the same as what I'm used to in VS2013.
Been hearing a lot about Visual Studio 2015 recently, as far as I am aware it is not even in Beta yet...<p>I am a .Net developer in a Corporate IT job, so I am exactly in the demographic Microsoft aims for as users (not buyers though). Visual Studio is hands down the best IDE, period.<p>The pricing is absolutely, absolutely insane.
The pricing for Visual Studio kind of blows my mind. I happen to think it's a great product and I don't mind paying for software (as a developer I want people to pay for software, or at least value it highly) but it creates a pretty high barrier to entry for developing Windows software.<p>Although maybe I'm wrong: I don't know exactly how restricted the free Community edition is. Also, Resharper apparently works with the free Community edition so that's a huge plus.
There is an Android version. I am curious, are there people out there who use Android device to code? I tried a bit QPython but it was frustrating not to be able to use the app I created from outside of QPython.
This is really cool. VS is ideal for someone like me that occasionally needs an IDE that works out of the box for button + code behind it type projects. (Tried Python GUI frameworks...what a mess)
Looks like the prices have been dropped and CodeLens is now available at the Premium level.<p>I can't wait until I can target builds against CoreCLR.