Visual Studio 2015 Preview and Open Sourcing .NET Announced

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 12 Nov 2014

Having a look at Visual Studio 2015

The next version of Visual Studio is right around the corner, it has previously been referred to as Visual Studio 14 but has now gotten its name; Visual Studio 2015. This new version of Visual Studio does not only include a bunch of new features that will make developers happier and more productive, but it also includes a new version in the family that means that you as a community contributor can get completely free version of Visual Studio 2015!

As any new version of Visual Studio, it's packed with amazing features that makes our lives as developers much easier. If you have been following the news you know that Microsoft have completely re-written their C# and VB compilers which are now completely written in managed code, open source and is called the .NET Compiler Platform. I am extremely excited about this being the compilers that will ship with Visual Studio 2015. It means that it is much easier for Microsoft and other vendors to extend the experience when working with C# and VB applications.

The power of the new .NET Compiler Platform has been shining through with Code Lense in the previous updates for Visual Studio 2013, which means that we have been getting a better experience when refactoring code out of the box with Visual Studio. With Visual Studio 2015 Preview, you will see analysers and refactoring packages being installed over NuGet, which will make it easier for anyone to distribute rules and fixes for common (and not so common) code issues. This will integrate nicely in the already very nice and pleasant refactoring experience in Visual Studio 2015 Preview.

Lambda Expressions in Watch and Immediate Window

This new feature will give us a completely different debugging experience! Over the year’s one of the most annoying things have been to debug lambda expressions, but no more! Visual Studio 2015 Preview ships with a nice revamped watch and immediate window that will allow you to write lambdas and LINQ!

You can read more about the announcement of Visual Studio 2015 Preview and what it contains at the MSDN Blog.

Download Visual Studio 2015 Preview

You can download Visual Studio 2015 Preview from VisualStudio.com! So what are you waiting for? It will install side by side with Visual Studio 2013, but if you have Visual Studio 14 CTP installed you will have to uninstall that first.

Visual Studio Community Edition

The new, FREE, version of Visual Studio can be found over at VisualStudio.com/free. If you are working with open source projects, this is definitely something you should be grabbing!

.NET Goes Open Source

Microsoft announced today that they are open sourcing .NET Core and if that is not enough, they are also targeting Linux and Mac!

This is big news for the open source community and for the future of development on .NET. We certainly have an interesting time ahead! You can read the full announcement on the MSDN Blog.

You can check out the repository on Github for more information.