Introducing the Visual Studio 2015 Preview for C# and VB

Download Visual Studio 2015 Preview and review the release notes.

Over the past several years, our team has been hard at work re-implementing the full language stacks for C# and Visual Basic. While this was a long investment, we knew that an improved stack with a cleaner architecture would allow our team to work faster, empower others to build "code smart" tools and applications, and create a richer and smarter IDE experience in Visual Studio.

Today, we are pleased to announce that this work has culminated with the release of Visual Studio 2015 Preview. Visual Studio 2015 Preview showcases many improvements—new language features, smarter and better IDE experiences, improved debugging, and code-aware "diagnostic analyzers"—that we believe make it the best version of Visual Studio to date. Our team will publish detailed blog posts on these improvements over the next couple weeks on the C#, Visual Basic, and F# blogs. In the meantime, here are some of the upcoming posts:

  IDE Improvements | Dustin Campbell

The IDE experiences have been brought to life! Every core C# and Visual Basic IDE feature has been completely rebuilt and refreshed. Dustin’s post will walk through some of the highlights and drill into new experiences around live code analysis and automated refactorings.

 

C#: New Language Features | Mads Torgersen

VS 2015 Preview includes C# 6, the latest installment of the language. C# 6 aims at making your everyday code cleaner without adding new concepts, helping remove boilerplate code and making your intent stand out more clearly. Mads’ post will take you through the dozen or so little features, including the null conditional dot ( ?. ) to make null checking fade into the background, string interpolation for easy formatting, and a refactoring-safe nameof operator to get the names of program elements as text.

 

Visual Basic: New Language Features | Lucian Wischik

In Visual Basic we're adding the same key new language features as C# for reducing boilerplate code. In addition we’ve rounded out lots of existing language features, mainly in response to user requests. ReadOnly auto-properties are a big favorite, along with multi-line string literals, comments within multiline LINQ queries, year-first date literals, partial interfaces and many more.

 

Debugging Improvements | Anthony D. Green

Anthony’s post will discuss our improvements to the C# and VB debugging experiences in Visual Studio 2015 Preview, including more extensive support for modern language features like LINQ queries, lambda expressions, and extension methods, which can now be used in the Watch window, Immediate window, conditional breakpoints, and other debugger contexts.

 

Diagnostic Analyzers & Code Fixes | Alex Turner

Alex’s post will introduce everyone to diagnostic analyzers. Diagnostic analyzers are a key new feature of Visual Studio 2015 that lets a NuGet package enable custom warnings and errors in the editor live as you type, with automatic code fixes that can clean up those issues for you. Packages can even be bundled together as a “code-aware library” that pulls in both an API and the domain-specific analyzers to make sure that you stay on course when using it – you’ll have targeted guidance from the moment you download the NuGet package. And because these analyzers are part of your project, everyone on your team gets to see the same warnings.

You can download a preview of the Code Analysis for Azure package now, and we expect many more analyzers to be available soon.

 

F#: A Preview of F# 4.0 | Lincoln Atkinson

The F# language and tooling continues to evolve with Visual F# 4.0, developed in partnership with our active open source developer community.  Lincoln’s post will walk you through the numerous enhancements and features that are ready today: constructors as first-class functions, simplified mutable values, a greatly expanded core library, improved project templates, and much more. Read this post to learn how to install the latest Visual F# update on top of VS 2015 Preview.

Download Visual Studio 2015 Preview. Please help us improve your developer experience by sending a “smile” from Visual Studio, providing feedback on UserVoice, joining our language discussions on Codeplex, or filing bugs on Connect!

Don’t forget to keep an eye on our blogs (C#, Visual Basic, F#) for more details over the next couple of weeks.

 

Over 'n' out, Kasey Uhlenhuth, Program Manager, Managed Languages Team