The world of mobile app development has been bursting at the seams with opportunities these last few years, as companies look for the next horizon of productivity gains and new revenue streams to fuel their growth. But along with the opportunities tied to each mobile platform comes the responsibility of ensuring a secure and seamless experience for the end user. This begs the question: How can companies build on multiple platforms, while still being responsive to market opportunities? The answer is cross-platform app development.

As the name implies, cross-platform app development tools make it easy for developers to share code across multiple platforms, rather than starting from scratch every time. Among the benefits of this approach are reduced software costs, the ability to harness a developer’s existing skills set, and faster time to market with new apps and updates.

There are a variety of cross-platform solutions out there, but Apache Cordova and Xamarin are perhaps the most widely known.

On April 28th from 10-11am PDT, we invite you to a free webinar with Ryan Salva, Principal PM Manager for Visual Studio Tools, who will talk you through the options and demonstrate our technology. You can register now for this free webinar.

To learn more about cross-platform app development in general, check out the Visual Studio Mobile Platforms page.

Bharat Bhat (@bharatsbhat), Marketing Manager, Microsoft Developer Tools & Services (IDEs, Code Editors, Dev Opsy cloud stuff) Bharat believes that the tools Microsoft offers today are the best out there and can help developers create amazing apps on any OS—cloud services and tooling included. In his past life, Bharat was a Java developer for 10 years in NYC, working mostly on financial transaction platforms and open source web projects.

At //build 2016, Microsoft announced the first public preview of a quick way to get Visual Studio “15” Preview. We’ve previously shared posts about what we’re building and why:

• Faster, Leaner Visual Studio Installer
• Visual Studio “15”: Installing just what you need

In building faster ways of getting VS, we needed to reduce the size of the minimum product, change a bit of the way the IDE itself ran, change the way components are installed on your computer, and reduce the way components can impact your system. In this article, I will share a little about what it took to make this come together. The details are not so much as to communicate final engineering changes, but to share a bit about how we’re building Visual Studio as a product to hopefully better fit your needs.

The “Core Editor” experience

When we looked at the overall makeup of what makes Visual Studio, depending on how you categorize the components they come out something like this:

• The Visual Studio “Application”: 4-6 GB
• Microsoft’s platform SDKs: 12-16 GB
• Runtimes (CLR, uCRT, ASP.NET, etc.): < 1 GB
• Emulators: 4GB (and up)

That’s a very large payload primarily optimized to make editing through ‘F5’ work ‘out of the box for the many platforms that Visual Studio supports. But that’s not necessarily what everyone needed. Many of you requested simple code editing and the ability to work across folders and projects quickly. In response, we invested in the ability to open a folder without the need for projects. In addition, by leveraging our support for TextMate bundles from Visual Studio 2015 Update 1, we’ve worked to give you quick access to code navigation, typing completion, and search without the need for build or full language services. Each of these features requires a relatively small footprint – only a few megabytes. This created an opportunity to have a common experience for all languages and platforms, allowing quick access to code editing and navigation without having to install several gigabytes to get started. We used this experience as our starting point, adding only a few select features that would help you to be productive with your code even without full project system support, including managed and native debugging, Team Explorer for work item management, and source code control support.

By focusing on these core experiences of Visual Studio as an application, we were able to build a coding experience that can be installed in around 325 MB.

Low-impact by design

Visual Studio has historically been optimized for ensuring that the first ‘F5’ experience with any project just works. This means deploying the runtimes and configurations necessary for that experience. That said, one of the things we heard from you was that having Visual Studio installed changes the state of your computer by installing runtimes, adding registry entries, and configuring the system for debugging, in ways that are not easily undone.

We decided we wanted Visual Studio’s core application to work more like an “app”: one folder full of all the application data such that it does not require impact on the system in order to run (at least not by default). To do that, we made changes that reduced the way we impact the system from the application, starting with the registry. The way Visual Studio and its components use the registry in the past can make it difficult to uninstall cleanly. For example, to avoid data loss, Visual Studio left the user data intact in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. In addition, previous versions of Visual Studio wrote a lot of data to the system registry, which is shared among all applications and the operating system. The amount of data we wrote could negatively impact overall system performance.

In this version, we’ve stopped writing component configuration to the system registry. For example, instead of writing to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE during installation, we leveraged our existing mechanism for writing configuration using “package-def” (.pkgdef) files. For saving user-specific configuration caches, we’ve stopped using HKEY_CURRENT_USER and moved to storing data in a new file under the AppData folder, moving several megabytes of data out of the system registry. To further ensure that Visual Studio has all that it needs contained in one place, we moved all of the Visual Studio application-specific assemblies out of the GAC, moving all those assemblies into our own application folder. To maintain our performance, we generate native images for the assemblies during install.

All of this enables Visual Studio to be available on the machine without the need for MSI and with very little system impact. As a result, we can start to imagine new, creative ways to deliver the core application to users without impacting the global state of Windows.

Dealing with Singletons

Even with Visual Studio available now as a simple code editor, much of the power associated with Visual Studio lies deeper in the debugging, diagnostic, and project experiences that integrate with runtimes and operating systems in extensive ways. To do this, our acquisition experience still allows customers to acquire the runtimes and configurations that make them productive on the platforms they are working with. These runtimes and SDKs are still mostly installed via MSIs. We’ve chained those experiences into our new installer while keeping the application portion of the experience explicitly separate.

In addition, some of the assets we deploy into MSBuild used to leverage the registry to find Visual Studio. In this case, the low-impact install is technically side-by-side with the “classic” type, MSI-based install experience; therefore, there can be more than one installed at a time. We changed those .targets files to avoid using the registry, instead relying on build variables that can be set by the IDE at build time.

Where do we go from here?

We’re not done yet. Some of the many challenges that remain include associating file extensions and protocols, offering more granular choices at install time, refining our MSBuild and command-line developer experience, fleshing out the extensibility story, and expanding the scope of our supported scenarios beyond C++ Desktop, C# Desktop, Python and Unity Tools.

Please try out the experience today by installing Visual Studio “15” Preview using the lightweight installer.

We’d love to hear from you! The best way send feedback is to click the ‘Send us feedback’ link in the new installer or through Report a Problem in Visual Studio itself. You can also add a new suggestion or comment on an existing suggestion on the Visual Studio UserVoice site.

Art Leonard, Principal Software Engineering Manager, Visual Studio Platform @artlms Art leads an engineering team responsible for many of the basic user experiences in Visual Studio, currently focused on improving the way users acquire and run Visual Studio. When he isn’t coding, you can find him having fun with his kids doing things like biking, building puppets, and playing silly songs.

Office’s message at Build was loud and clear: Office is an open market for developers who want to reinvent productivity, backed by a consumer base of 1.2 billion users. Qi Lu welcomed developers to the Office ecosystem in his Build keynote, and showcased new robust extensibility features that enable you to create custom experiences in Office that look and feel native. A new wave of excitement and growth is sweeping through the Office ecosystem, and there is no better time to be an Office developer. And no better tool than Visual Studio to get started!

As a Visual Studio user, you can get started right away and take advantage of all the new Office extensibility goodness inside the IDE.

• For Visual Studio 2015, download Update 2 of Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2015
• For Visual Studio “15”, install Office Developer Tools from the Visual Studio “15” installer

We are also pleased to announce Preview 2 of Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2015. Preview 2 adds the support for SharePoint 2016 solutions and add-in development in Visual Studio 2015, on top of the new features available in Update 2 of Office Developer Tools. For Visual Studio “15,” SharePoint 2016 support is available by default when you install Office Developer Tools.

Now let’s take a closer look at how the Office Developer Tools optimize getting started with add-in development.

New Office Add-in Project Templates

We found that most developers start an add-in project with the goal of creating a customized experience inside a single Office application. This insight led us to simplify the flow of creating a new Office add-in project inside Visual Studio. In the New Project dialog, you will now see new add-in templates specific to an Office application (Excel, Word, Outlook, or PowerPoint). These templates highlight the choice of the add-in’s Office host as the first and only step you need to take to get started with add-in development.

With the new templates, you can create add-ins that add new functionality to an Office host. You can build task pane add-ins or use add-in commands to create buttons in the Office ribbon.

With the Excel and PowerPoint templates, you can also create content add-ins, which embed interactive objects such as maps or data visualizations into the document itself. You will be presented with the option when you create the add-in project.

New Starter Code

Each host-specific add-in template now has simpler project structure and great starter code that showcases the new Office extensibility features such as add-in commands, Fabric UI, and enriched host-specific Office.js APIs. If you want to try out the new features, you can just press F5 and run the starter code in the project to see what it looks like, without changing a single line of code.

Let’s walk through what you’ll see when you run the starter code in an Excel Add-in template.

Add-in Commands

The first thing you’ll notice is that your add-in project appears as a button in the Excel application’s ribbon. The Office ribbon is a new extension point made available through add-in commands.

This button can perform a JavaScript function call or open up a pane with custom HTML. In the case of our sample, clicking the add-in button opens a task pane.

One thing to note here is that add-in commands are not available in Office 2013 or Office 2016 builds earlier than version 16.0.6769.0000, with the exception of Outlook. But there’s no need to worry about having to create separate add-ins depending on the Office version. The sample manifest in the starter code shows you how to make a single add-in compatible with all Office versions by lighting up add-in command features in Office 2016 and falling back to task pane behavior for older versions.

Fabric UI

Looking through the starter code, you may also wonder where the UI of the add-in is designed, since the Home.css file has nothing in it. Instead, the code uses Fabric UI, which is Office’s UI framework that you can use to design add-ins that look and feel like Office. You no longer have to write custom css to make your add-in look like a part of Office.

Rich Office.js APIs

The sample also introduces how to utilize Office’s enriched Office.js APIs specific to Office applications, which enable developers to build add-ins that deeply influence application-specific workflows.

The simple example you will see in the starter code is using the APIs to load sample data for the add-in into the Excel spreadsheet, and to highlight the highest value from the range of cells you select. Again, some older versions of Office do not support the new version of the APIs. As you can see below, the starter code illustrates how to create fallback logic for older versions of Office so that this single add-in is compatible with all Office versions.

The other templates for Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint add-ins have starter code that features slightly different tasks applicable to each application.

SharePoint 2016 Development

Last but not least! Visual Studio “15” Preview and Microsoft Office Developer Tools Preview 2 for Visual Studio 2015 include new templates for developing SharePoint 2016 solutions and add-ins.

Please note that to develop SharePoint solutions, you need to have SharePoint Server 2016.

Send Us Feedback!

It’s an exciting time to be an Office developer, and we want to ensure you have the best tools to get started. We would love to hear any feedback you have or issues you run into with the updates for Office Developer Tools. Please use Visual Studio’s Report a Problem feature to send us suggestions or bugs.

You can start using the new Office extensibility features once you install or update to the latest version of Office 2016.

Please note that for the older Office 2016 versions, you need to take some additional steps to enable F5 debugging of projects with add-in commands. Please refer to this samples site to get more information.

If you would like to keep on top of the latest updates on Office and get access to Office builds that even include developer features in Preview, you can enroll in the Office Insiders Program by following the links below.

• For Office 365 Home, Personal and University Subscribers: Insiders Program
• For Office 365 Commercial customers: First Release Build

Enjoy!

Ji Eun Kwon, Program Manager, Office Developer Tools @Ji_Eun__Kwon Ji Eun Kwon is the program manager for Developer Tools for Office and SharePoint. She joined Microsoft in 2013 and has since been focusing on developer experiences inside Visual Studio. Prior to owning the Office Developer Tools, she worked on Visual Studio’s identity and licensing experiences.

Less than a month ago, at //BUILD, we announced the integration of Xamarin technology into our Visual Studio product line, furthering our Any Developer, Any App, Any Platform approach and bringing even more power and productivity to the nearly 13 million devs who have already downloaded Visual Studio 2015 and the 10 million who have downloaded Visual Studio Community 2015. This integration provides Visual Studio users (like you :)) great additional value to create beautiful and highly performant native Android, iOS and Windows apps, at no additional cost. The combination of the existing Microsoft product portfolio with Xamarin technology creates an end-to-end solution for every stage of the mobile development lifecycle. We can’t wait to see what you deliver!

Today, at Xamarin Evolve 2016, we are pleased to announce further progress on the integration of Xamarin into Visual Studio. Visual Studio on Windows now provides an end to end developer experience for building iOS apps, so that you can stay in your favorite IDE and build for all platforms.

Debug and test iOS apps from Visual Studio on Windows

We’re introducing two new ways to debug and test your iOS apps directly from within Visual Studio. Our iOS Simulator lets you simulate and interact with your iOS apps in Visual Studio — even supporting multi-touch interactions on Windows machines with capable touch screens. We also unveiled our iOS USB remoting, which makes it possible to deploy and debug apps from Visual Studio to an iPad or iPhone plugged into your Windows PC.

Build and continuous integration for iOS and Android apps with Visual Studio Team Services

We’ve improved out of the box Visual Studio Team Services tasks for building Xamarin apps and using Xamarin Test Cloud to help you get going quickly on continuous integration (CI) in the cloud. These features work for both Xamarin Android and iOS since Team Services can build, test, and deploy your Xamarin iOS apps via your own integrated Mac or a 3^rd party cloud service like MacinCloud or MacStadium. You can even extend your CI workflow into continuous delivery using release management and the new HockeyApp and Google Play Team Services extensions.

Test your iOS & Android apps on real devices

The new Test Recorder Visual Studio Plugin brings Test Recorder’s ability to generate test scripts to Visual Studio users. Simply interact with your app on your device or in the simulator and Test Recorder automatically generates scripts that can be run on thousands of devices with Xamarin Test Cloud’s automated app testing.

We’re excited to see increased developer productivity by enabling seamless experiences in Visual Studio, as a single IDE for all mobile & server platforms. For more information about the news, please check out Nat Friedman’s first-ever Official Microsoft Blog post, then read the technical click-down posts by Miguel de Icaza and team on the Xamarin blog.

Finally, watch some of the Xamarin Evolve 2016 live-streamed keynotes and sessions to learn more.

Amanda Silver, Director of Program Management, Visual Studio @AmandaKSilver Amanda Silver is the Director of Program Management in Visual Studio building the platform and the tools that allow developers build any kind of client application. Her team also builds Microsoft’s JavaScript engine “Chakra” as well as the TypeScript language.

In April the community added another 100 new Visual Studio extensions to the Visual Studio Gallery. To help you enjoy this creativity from the community, every month or two I’ll be introducing some of the new extensions that caught my eye. Here are the highlights for this month:

• Open in Notepad++ (Good old Notepad++)
• File Differ (Compare two files)
• And Pizza For All (Did somebody say Pizza?!)
• Visual C++ For Linux Development

Open in Notepad++ by Calvin A. Allen

Download Open in Notepad++ from the Visual Studio Gallery

This extension adds an option to open a file in Notepad++ to the right-click menu of Solution Explorer. We have previously seen similar extensions like Open in Sublime and Open in Visual Studio Code. Calvin based this extension on the open source code of the other two and added this helpful feature for all users of Notepad++.

File Differ by Mads Kristensen

Download File Differ from the Visual Studio Gallery

At last month’s //build conference, Mads held a session on building Visual Studio extensions. During the session he created this helpful extension to compare two files in your project. It took him less than one hour to write the code, publish it to GitHub and integrate it into continuous integration – all live on stage. You can catch the recording of the session over at Channel 9.

And Pizza For All by Daniel Meixner

Download And Pizza For All from the Visual Studio Gallery

This extension allows you to order Pizza straight from within Visual Studio. Yum! More seriously though, this is a great example of how easy it is to integrate a website into Visual Studio. The source of the extension is available on GitHub and it’s a great starting point if you want to integrate a web application into Visual Studio.

Visual C++ For Linux Development

Download Visual C++ For Linux Development from the Visual Studio Gallery

The Visual C++ extension for Linux Development allows you to write C++ code for Linux right in Visual Studio. You can create a new project, remote compile, and debug right from within Visual Studio.

Top 10 Popular Extensions from April 2016

As I mentioned in the beginning, we added a great number of new extensions in April. Out of the new ones added, here are the 10 most popular ones — give them a try!

1. Visual C++ for Linux Development
2. Xamarin Forms Templates
3. Solidity
4. File Differ
5. Learn the Shortcut
6. Web Accessibility Checker
7. Grunt Snippet Pack
8. Agent SVN
9. vsXen
10. Ninja Coder For MvvmCross and Xamarin Forms

Build your own

These few examples of simple integrations show a wide range of what you can build through Visual Studio’s extensibility framework. If that piqued your interest, our Integrate site has some great tutorials and videos on how to get started with Visual Studio extensions: VisualStudio.com/integrate. Take a look and let me know how it goes. I’m also hanging out in our extendvs Gitter chat as @bertique. Come on by and give me a shout.

Michael Dick, Senior Program Manager, Visual Studio @midi2dot0 Michael Dick is a Program Manager working on the Visual Studio team. Before joining Microsoft, Michael worked at a variety of tech companies and is passionate about developer tools. He is currently focusing on the ecosystem and extensibility experience for Visual Studio.

Update 9 of the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO) is ready for you! You’ll soon see a notification in Visual Studio to install the update or you can download and install it directly, now. If this is the first you’ve heard of TACO, take a moment and learn more about our mobile developer tools for web developers.

This release includes all of the goodness of TACO Update 8, which focused on giving you more control of your dev environment and providing better guidance for plugins. Update 9 focuses on two main themes:

• Saving you trips to the command line
• Getting started faster, by providing more prescriptive guidance

In this post, I’ll highlight the main changes included in Visual Studio TACO Update 9. You can read about the full release in the Visual Studio TACO Update 9 release notes.

Saving you a trip to the command line

When building apps with Apache Cordova, you’re going to use plugins to access native device capabilities (e.g. the Camera). Visual Studio TACO has always had tools to help you manage these plugins. It provides several ways to install common and custom plugins and now we’ve added a new option that lets you simply add a plugin by using its id.

Typically, you may want to install a plugin by id, when you want to use a custom plugin from the Cordova Plugin Repository. You could do this with the Cordova command line interface, by opening a command prompt and typing the command cordova plugin add <id>. We wanted to save you that trip over to the command line, so that you can stay focused on your code!

Now, just go to the Custom tab of the configuration designer, enter your plugin ID, and go.

Getting started faster

When first creating a project using the Cordova blank template, we’ve redesigned the start page to make it easier for you to get going with your first application. The layout and content was rearranged so that you can quickly read over the important steps for getting started, and all of our links on this page were updated to point at the latest and best information.

Feedback and Thanks

Along with the changes mentioned here, we also fixed many bugs to improve the stability and performance of Visual Studio TACO. You can read about the full release in the Update 9 release notes.

It’s hard to believe this is our ninth release since Visual Studio 2015 RTM – We couldn’t do it without your support and feedback! Thank you for all of your direct emails, discussions on Stack Overflow, and feedback shared on our documentation site.

If you haven’t done it by now, go download update 9 and let us know what you think!

Ricardo Minguez (aka Rido) Senior Program Manager. Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova Rido is a program manager for the Visual Studio tools for Apache Cordova team. He has been working with web technologies since the beginning of the browsers, and now he loves to reuse the same skills to build mobile apps. You can reach him in twitter at @ridomin.

Yes, it might seem a bit odd to have a post with “March” in the title now that it’s already May, but it does take a few weeks for the data to show what you’ve all been reading about lately. So with no further ado, here are those recent highlights!

Xamarin included with Visual Studio. As announced at //build 2016 to great applause, Xamarin’s full cross-platform, C#/.NET-based mobile app platform is now included at no extra cost in all editions of Visual Studio. No more licensing! Clearly this has made a difference. Nat Friedman noted during his keynote at Evolve 2016 last week that interest in Xamarin has spiked an impressive 3x in the last month. And perhaps the reason is simple: as Mickey Gousset writes in Two Reasons Microsoft acquiring Xamarin is important to you, .NET has always had the potential to deliver truly universal apps. The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure, to which I’ll also add HockeyApp, bring us very close to fulfilling that promise.

Special note: for more from Xamarin Evolve 2016, see these posts:

• Previews and Updates in Xamarin Studio, Xamarin for Visual Studio, and Workbooks
• Faster and Easier Mobile App Development with Xamarin.Forms
• The New, Mobile-Optimized Development Lifecycle
• News from Xamarin Evolve: What’s next for Visual Studio and Xamarin

Tooling for Apache Cordova. Of course, Xamarin isn’t alone in this quest, and there are many web developers looking to leverage their skills on mobile through Apache Cordova. Microsoft’s ongoing support for these developers through Cordova tooling is demonstrated through a continuous stream of updates: Tools for Apache Cordova Update 7 (March 9), Update 8 (April 4), and Update 9 (May 3). All of these contain features and improvements that you’ve told us are important to you. One such priority is simplifying Cordova development on Macs through the Cordova Tools extension for Visual Studio Code, and many developers have found Sergiy Baydachnyy’s walkthrough, Cordova Tools for Visual Studio Code, very helpful for configuring and using the extension

More Extensions for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code: Extensibility is easily one of the most important features for development tools in the Visual Studio family. It allows all of you to create and share exceptional time-saving tools with the rest of the community. First, if you haven’t been following Michael Dick’s series on new and notable extensions, now is a great time to review his posts for March 2016 and April 2016. On the Visual Studio Code side, Jeff Young shares the release of the Visual Studio Team Services extension, and for all of you who are authoring extensions, Ed Price shares what he calls a “palpable plethora” of goodies in 14 Extension Authoring Improvements. We expect that you’ll be keeping Michael Dick quite busy with reviewing your creations!

Open Source Momentum: In a very recent interview with Business Insider, Xamarin co-founder Miguel de Icaza commented on how fundamentally Microsoft has shifted to embracing open source, and it continues to show. As promised at //build and fulfilled at Evolve, Xamarin itself is now open-source. Shanku Niyogi, the General Manager of Visual Studio, also announced that Microsoft joined the Eclipse Foundation to bring more tools to the community, including open-sourcing the free Team Explorer Everywhere plugin for Eclipse. And to top it off, Justin Clareburt and Michael Dick also announced Open Sourcing the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools, a set of powerful extensions that also serve as excellent examples from which you can build more extensions of your own.

R Tools for Visual Studio. On the Big Data front, the most popular statistical/data analysis language in use today, R, finds itself fully at home in Visual Studio. In his post, Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio, Shahrokh Mortazavi gives you a feature run-down of these tools, which are (no surprise), also open-source. John Lam, in Introducing R Tools for Visual Studio, also provides you with a video introduction along with a quick tour of the R language itself. And in a surprise move, John reveals that he actually wrote this post directly in Visual Studio using his own RMarkdown extension, a dialect of Markdown “which supports embedding executable R code snippets within it.” Check it out!

For the Web: As you probably know, Angular.js has been a very popular client-side library among web developers and those working on Apache Cordova apps. In his Web.Dev 2 video: Getting Started with Angular 2.0 (24m 44s), Jeremy Foster gives you a detailed walkthrough so you can understand all the bits that are going on. Similarly, Kingcean takes a detailed look at JavaScript Promises in EcmaScript 6. And if you’re game for diving into another even more specific area, take a look at the current state of dependency inversion in JavaScript by Wolk Software Engineering, as apparently many developers have been. On the other hand, you might be investing more time in building ASP.NET AJAX applications, in which case you’ll want to read about v16.1 of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

Pull Requests and App Design: To wrap up this list of the popular posts, here are two more that have, as you can guess from the heading, absolutely nothing to do with one another! First is Matthew Mitrik’s post, Squash: A Whole New Way to Merge Pull Requests, in which he describes a Visual Studio Team Services merge option for Git, squash merge. Squashingproduces a merge commit with only one parent and thus greatly simplifying target branch history. Second is Getting started with app design by the Windows Apps Teams, which helps many of us non-designers step into this fascinating world. To this I would add a personal recommendation for the book, The Non-designers Design Book by Robin Williams (a designer, not the late comedian). Although this title is geared toward graphic design, I found it nonetheless very insightful for developing a more designer-like awareness of what’s happening visually within an app.

Kraig Brockschmidt, Senior Content Developer, Visual Studio @kraigbro Kraig has been around Microsoft since 1988, working in roles that always have to do with helping developers write great software. Currently he’s focused on developing content for cross-platform mobile app development with both Xamarin and Cordova. He writes for MSDN Magazine, is the author of Programming Windows Store Apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript (two editions) and Inside OLE (two editions, if you remember those) from Microsoft Press, occasionally blogs on kraigbrockschmidt.com, and can be found lurking around a variety of developer conferences.

If you haven’t downloaded Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 yet, now is a good time to do so. In the latest KB we have addressed some of the top reported problems around performance and reliability. So far, we’ve made 14 fixes and updates, that address Visual Studio build fail issues, Visual Studio crashes, and improve memory usage by disabling FSD by default. See the full list of fixes at MSDN – Update for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2

What do you need to do to get these improvements in Update 2?

• If you’ve already got Update 2, you can download the KB3151378 patch from MSDN to get the latest fixes.
• If you haven’t got Update 2 yet, download Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 to get all the latest improvements. You can also install it from within Visual Studio 2015 by going to Tools > Extensions and Updates.

The current KB3151378 patch (version 14.0.25130.0) will also enable in-product notifications to appear when there are newer patch versions available for download, so you won’t miss out on further improvements. This KB3151378 article is a cumulative list of all fixes for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. Keep an eye on it for future updates.

The Visual Studio team appreciates your continued feedback! Please submit bugs through Report a Problem in Visual Studio.

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio @JohnMont John is responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, and .NET. He been at Microsoft for 17 years, working in developer technologies the whole time.

Last month, we released our first preview of the next version of Visual Studio. After listening to your feedback, we have fixed issues and improved experiences in this preview. Download Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 to get the latest. This is still a Preview and is unsupported, so please refrain from installing it on your production environments.

This preview like the previous one, lays groundwork for the next version of Visual Studio. We primarily focused on bug fixes and a few feature updates. New features include; making the account settings dialog more accessible to screen readers, diagnostics improvements to help track down focus related issues, Edit and Continue for XAML apps, and simplified debug configuration in Folder view. Preview 2 also includes the latest Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova Update 9 which supports Cordova 6.1.1.

The new light weight installer we introduced in Visual Studio “15” Preview is also available for Visual Studio “15” Preview 2. You can download Preview 2 with the new installer. Remember, this is an early preview so the installer doesn’t yet support all Visual Studio features. So if you want a fuller set of components, please install Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 directly without the lightweight installer. Detailed release notes for the new installer are available at http://aka.ms/vsnewinstallerreadme.

There is one breaking change I want to call out. The change is in how Visual Studio consumes templates and requires that you define templates in template manifest files. This change will not impact anyone in this release, but it is a heads up that templates not defined in template manifest files will stop working in the next Visual Studio “15” release. This change will only impact anyone who authors Visual Studio project templates. You can find out more about this breaking change on MSDN.

Check out the Visual Studio “15” Preview Release Notes and Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 Known Issues for the complete list of what’s available in Visual Studio “15” Preview 2.

As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Report a Problem option in Visual Studio. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio @JohnMont John is responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, and .NET. John has been at Microsoft for 17 years, working in developer technologies the whole time. Reach him on Twitter

Macros have always been popular, first as part of the product, and now as an extension. In response to your feedback we have upgraded the Macros for Visual Studio 2013 extension to be compatible with Visual Studio 2015. You can download the upgraded extension from the Visual Studio Gallery.

But wait, there’s more!
As part of our commitment to partnering with our developer community, we have open-sourced the code. So now you can view the code, make your own improvements, and contribute to the project for future releases. The open source project is available on GitHub under the MIT license.

The Macros extension can help you be more productive by enabling you to automate repetitive tasks in the IDE. It lets you record and playback most of the commands in Visual Studio – including text editing operations. Some common examples include: adding a header to all your files; formatting rows of data; and creating shortcuts for frequently used commands. Check out the examples available in the Samples folder in the Macros Explorer – or experiment with it yourself!

Justin Clareburt, Senior Program Manager, Visual Studio Justin Clareburt is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio team, currently working in the Visual Studio extensibility space. He has over 20 years of Software Engineering experience having previously worked for several large organizations including Amazon, NewsCorp, Symantec, and the Australian Government. He brings to the team his expert knowledge of IDEs and a passion for creating the ultimate development experience.

We are pleased to announce the ASP.NET Core Tooling Preview release to support the .NET Core RC2 and ASP.NET Core RC2 release. Get the new version of the framework and Visual Studio 2015 support now at: http://dot.net

Tooling Preview, What’s That?

With this release, we’re splitting the delivery of the Visual Studio tools from the ASP.NET Core and .NET Core runtime and libraries. Those frameworks are almost ready for RTM, and we are working on delivering the advanced capabilities for building and managing applications built with these new tools. A full description of this release schedule change is available on the .NET team blog. More details about the ASP.NET changes can be found on the Web Development blog, and details of the .NET Core update can be found on the .NET Team blog.

Support for .NET CLI

With the RC2 release of .NET Core, we introduced the .NET Command Line Interface to enable easy construction, package management, and compilation of applications using the new .NET Core SDK. However, this is Visual Studio and we deliver visual tools that make working with these tools easier. That’s exactly what we’ve done and packaged support for these tasks in Visual Studio to make use of the dotnet tool. From Visual Studio, when you use the standard compile tools you know and love, you will see in the output window the same commands execute if you were working with their applications directly on the command-line:

With this change in .NET tooling, we are also delivering support for the debugger to inspect your application just as you have with previous versions of ASP.NET.

Support for RC1 and RC2 projects

You will still be able to open your RC1 constructed projects in Visual Studio 2015. You should have in your global.json file an indicator of the version of the SDK in use to manage your project:

While the global.json file contains a version “1.0.0-rc1*” Visual Studio will enable the same compilation and management tools that you used for the RC1 version. If you remove this value from the sdk configuration option, or remove the sdk configuration option altogether, Visual Studio will start using the new .NET CLI tools with the RC2. This feature switch should help you upgrade your project from RC1 to RC2.

.NET Core Templates

Starting with this version of the web tooling, we are introducing a separation of the templates for .NET Core and the .NET Framework. When you enter the new project dialog, you will now be prompted to choose a template and framework just as you do any other project type:

There is also a complete section of templates on the left dedicated to the .NET Core framework. In this area, you can choose to start with a template to build a .NET Core base web application, .NET Core command-line application, or a .NET Core compatible class library that compiles to a NuGet package.

Support for Authentication and Authorization in Web API

During the construction of a new Web API project, you can now opt to activate authentication capabilities using Active Directory or the Work and School accounts options:

This has the effect of placing an AuthorizeAttribute on the template generated controller, and you can further define your security policy in the Startup.cs file for your application.

Summary

This is a significant set of changes to support the new .NET Core and ASP.NET project systems and runtimes in Visual Studio 2015, and we’re just getting started. With this release, you have an updated go-live license for this version of the ASP.NET runtime and libraries. We will continue to evolve the editor capabilities in Visual Studio to further support these new project types. Get a copy of this update for Visual Studio now from http://dot.net

Jeff Fritz, Program Manager, .NET Developer Outreach Team Jeff is a long time web developer, systems architect and survivor of the dot-com bust.  With a history of almost 15 years delivering multi-tenant web applications in the financial, pharmaceutical, and education industries, Jeff has a long history of large-scale successful web application launches.  You can learn more from Jeff on his blog at www.jeffreyfritz.com and on twitter at @csharpfritz

At the Build 2016 conference, we released the Desktop App Converter which enables you to bring your existing desktop applications to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

With the Desktop App Converter, a number of important improvements are being made to the Windows platform for all developers. First, you can convert existing Windows desktop apps or games to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) packages so your users will be able to install them easily and experience seamless updates. Once converted to the UWP application model, the desktop app has access to new UWP APIs which previously were inaccessible to desktop apps, such as Live Tiles and push notifications.

Introducing Desktop to UWP Packaging Project in Visual Studio

Visual Studio “15” adds support for a new packaging project that makes it easier to build and test apps converted with the Desktop Bridge directly from within Visual Studio to make your development experience more productive:

• The packaging project has a configuration file that allows Visual Studio to deploy any updates you make to the binaries from editing your desktop app projects directly into the UWP app package.
• You can launch and debug the UWP app package directly from within Visual Studio when you hit F5. You can set a break point in your existing code and step through it.

Enabling support for Desktop to UWP packaging project

To try this out, make sure you’re set up to use the Desktop App Converter.

• Make sure you’re running Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14342
• Install Desktop App Converter Preview (Project Centennial)
• Install Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 or higher
• Download Desktop to UWP Packaging VSIX from the Visual Studio Gallery

Creating new projects

You will find a new project type in the New Project Dialog that you can add to your existing desktop app solution, the output of which was previously run through the converter.

There is a new Package Layout property in the Desktop to UWP Packaging project that let you configure where to copy your code’s build output into the UWP:

Deploying changes from desktop app projects into the UWP app package

The project also contains a mapping file (AppXPackageFileList.xml) which specifies the files to copy from the existing app’s project build output into the UWP app package. You need to configure this file to copy files (such as .dll, .exe or any other resources) your application might need and were modified inside Visual Studio.

Debugging the application

You can set the packaging project as the start-up project and hit F5 to start the debugger. The desktop app project will build, followed by the packaging project copying the artifacts from the build output and launching the debugger on the updated UWP app package.

Next Steps

Check out this MSDN article Dev Center article for more detail on how you can leverage this workflow. We would love to hear your feedback on how we can make your experience of brining your Win32/.NET application to the Universal Windows Store even better.

As you explore the tools on current preview builds, we’re very keen on hearing about your experiences and receiving your feedback. The best place to make feature suggestions is on the Windows Developer UserVoice site. For questions and bug reports, please head over to the Developing Universal Windows apps forums.

Enjoy!

Pete Faraday, Program Manager, VS ClientPete works on the Windows Tools team within Visual Studio. Originally from the UK, he has been in Seattle for the last 20 years. In his spare time, he enjoys coffee, home repairs and life near the waterfront.

.NET plays an important role in the lives of many Visual Studio developers, I for one have worked on many ASP.NET, WPF Desktop and other back-end .NET services over the years in my career and therefore its really exciting for me to be part of the team to bring you yet another dotnetConf, back again and streaming live this week (and for free, with no need to register)!

Watch Live June 7^th– 9^th 2016, or catch-up on-demand via Channel 9 archive

You can watch the live stream on Channel 9 for three days, June 7^th-9^th 2016 by simply visiting the Channel 9 website between 8:30am PDT (keynotes) and 4pm PDT each day.

If you miss any of the content live, don’t worry! we’ll be sure to post every session on-demand after it streams live for you to watch anytime in the event page.

dotnetConf 2016 details: full Agenda is live

This year our virtual event will split its content across three days, with each day starting with a keynote and having an overall theme, here’s the details:

• Day 1, June 7^th with opening keynote from Scott Hunter, followed by a full day of sessions focused on web development (ASP.NET & Azure) and managed Languages and Visual Studio debugging
• Day 2, June 8^th, with opening keynote from Miguel de Icaza, followed by a full day of sessions focused on app development, including Xamarin cross-platform native apps, Windows development, App Services for Mobile apps, HockeyApp and NuGet
• Day 3, June 9^th, with opening keynote from Scott Hanselman, followed by a full day of sessions from our community and FTE speakers on a variety of topics including ASP.NET, Azure, Xamarin, Unity game development, open source and much more

For the full agenda of all speakers and topics, you’ll find that info in the Channel 9 .NET Conf 2016 event website: https://channel9.msdn.com/events/dotnetConf/2016

You can also check out past dotnetConf events by visiting our Channel 9 Archives:

• dotnetConf 2015
• dotnetConf 2014

Thank you for reading and we hope that you’ll virtually join us for dotnetConf 2016 and we look forward to engaging with you on Twitter! Interact with our event by using the hashtag #dotnetconf and follow us on twitter at @dotnet and @visualstudio.

Dmitry Lyalin has been coding professionally for 16+ years, he’s worked in a lot of different industries helping companies solve problems through the use of technology. Dmitry currently works as a Product Manager for Visual Studio, with a focus on the developer community. In his spare time, he loves to work on side projects including building Windows apps and Azure cloud services and is an avid PC gamer. Follow him on twitter: @lyalindotcom

Today we are sharing Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 RC. This release candidate primarily focuses on stability, performance, and bug fixes, but we also have some feature updates. I’ll share highlights in the rest of this post.

Tools for Apache Cordova. This update includes TACO Update 9 and TACO Update 10, which adds plugins for Intune, Azure engagement, security, and SQLite storage, as well as the ability to add plugins from the config designer either by npm package name or ID. It also includes support for Cordova 6.1.1.

Application Insights and HockeyApp. Developer Analytics Tools v7.0.1 adds has diagnostics tools events for ASP.NET 5 RC1 and ASP.NET Core RC2 projects. We also improved the search experience: search automatically refreshes if you change search criteria such as filters, date ranges, and selected events, and you can go to code from requests in search and also “find telemetry for this…” in the Search menu. For further details, check out the release notes in Microsoft Azure Documentation.

Debugging and Diagnostics. Update 3 RC includes Diagnostics Tool support for applications running on Windows OneCore devices, including HoloLens and Windows IoT. You will now get better performance and reliability in C++ Edit and Continue when FASTLINK is enabled. And we improved XAML UI Debugging so the new Track Focus feature in the Live Visual Tree will cause any selection changes in the Visual Tree to update the currently focused element.

Visual Studio IDE. This update addresses a lot of feedback regarding problems with subscriptions through an online identity or key used to unlock the IDE. You no longer need to login to my.visualstudio.com to activate your subscription. We have improved error handling for common licensing issues. We’ve begun securing all web links such as our terms of service and privacy statement over HTTPS as we already do for personally identifiable information. Additionally, we have made accessibility improvements in the Account Settings dialog for activating a subscription and entering a product key.

C#/VB/Roslyn. In this release you will see many performance improvements including when running code diagnostics on an entire solution. To learn about code diagnostic performance improvements read the How to: Enable and Disable Full Solution Analysis for Managed Code page on MSDN. Other bug fixes include –

• Performance improvements to the C# background code analysis engine that collects errors and warnings. These improvements have also significantly reduced overall memory consumption.
• Performance improvements to the C# GoTo Implementation and Find All References. You can try these by selecting an object, right-clicking on it and then selecting them from the menu.
• You can now enable an option to suggest usings for types in reference assemblies or NuGet packages. You can try this under Tools > Options > Text Editor > C# > Advanced, “Using Directives”.
• When you apply a “fix all” action to document/project/solution we now display a progress bar.

Other updates. This release includes enhancements to Tools for Universal Windows Apps. Architecture tools has updates to address a lot of your feedback around performance and reliability along with updates to features like Code Map, Layer Validation, and UML Diagrams. Visual C++ has updates to the C++ compiler, C++ libraries and C++ MDD in this release.

Check the Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 RC Release Notes and Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 RC Known Issues for all the details. To learn more about other related downloads, see the Downloads page. You can also access the bits and release notes right now on an Azure-hosted VM or download here. You should be able to install this on top of previous installations of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. We’ve also released Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 3 RC today. You can see what’s new there in the TFS Update 3 RC Release Notes. And TFS Update 3 RC Known Issues.

As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Send Feedback option (Send a Smile) in Visual Studio. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio @JohnMont John is responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, and .NET. John has been at Microsoft for 17 years, working in developer technologies the whole time.

We are proud to present Update 10 of the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO). You can look forward to installing it with Update 3 of Visual Studio 2015, or download and install it directly now.

If this is the first time you’ve heard of TACO, try our beginner’s guide and build your first app for Android, iOS and Windows, with JavaScript!

In Update 10, we delivered two major areas of upgrade:

1. Add plugins that require parameters through the config.xml designer, or select from 8 new plugins in our Core plugins list to access device capabilities and Azure services.
2. Adding support for the newest versions of Cordova, as well as moving users away from older Cordova versions (4.x and lower).

For more details, see our Update 10 release notes.

More plugins, better plugins

Part of what makes Cordova a great platform for mobile app development is its ecosystem of over 1,200 plugins that enable users to access a device’s native capabilities (think camera, GPS, local file system, etc.). Developers can leverage plugins contributed by companies like Adobe, IBM, Intel and Google using the Custom Plugin tab.

Previously, our tools did not support adding plugins that required parameters. Now you can add these plugins in the config.xml designer such as Azure Mobile Engagement (shown below). This plugin takes in parameters such as connection strings that allow your app to retrieve data from the AZME portal. While most plugins do not need parameters, we are committed to enabling our users to use any and all Cordova plugins.

We also provide a curated list of verified plugins useful for enterprise scenarios in our config.xml designer. This month, we’re adding 5 new plugins to that list:

• Microsoft Intune App SDK – Add data protection features into your app.
• Azure Mobile Engagement – Integrate with the Azure Mobile Engagement (AZME) SDK, and add data connectivity, authentication and push notifications to your app.
• HockeyApp – Get crash reporting, beta distribution and user behavior metrics.
• CodePush – Skip the app store and dynamically update your app immediately.
• SQLite storage – Use this popular self-contained, zero-configuration SQL database engine in your app for offline app management.

Hello Cordova 6.x, Goodbye Cordova 4.x (and lower)

We have updated the default Cordova version in new projects to 6.1.1, and we also support the latest Cordova release of 6.2.0.

We have also discontinued support for the ability to add plugins in projects that target Cordova version 4.x or lower, and aligned ourselves with Apache Cordova’s official recommended method of adding plugins hosted on npm. Currently, less than 3% of all active TACO projects target a Cordova version 4.x or lower.

This upgrade helps us focus on building better plugin add support for newer versions of Cordova. We recommend you do upgrade your project version to the latest version of Cordova in order to get the benefits of new features and stability improvements.

Jumpstart your Cordova app with Ionic

It’s no secret that the Ionic Framework is a hugely popular starting point for Cordova users. We love how it makes it easy to write UI that automatically adjusts based on what OS your device is running on.

We’ve put together a couple Visual Studio extensions to get you started fast in Ionic

• The Ionic Pack – tools ranging from IntelliSense to validation to make you more productive working with the Ionic Framework.
• Ionic Project Templates – a set of 3 templates that cover all the basic app UI patterns (). It provides the code structure and adds the dependencies you need to have an Ionic project up and running fast.

Preview now: The future of Cordova browser simulation

We are exploring new browser-based simulation tools to give users an alternative to Ripple. One that has been cooking for a bit is TACO Simulate, our in-house mobile device simulator that is available in Visual Studio Code.

We’d love to have you try out the product and give us early feedback. To download

1. Pick up the master branch on https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cordova
2. In the command prompt, build it using node_modules/.bin/vsce package in the command prompt
3. This will create them a VSIX that you can drag and drop into VS Code.

We also created a video walkthrough to get you started.

Feedback and Thanks

Along with the changes mentioned here, we also fixed many bugs to improve the stability and performance of Visual Studio TACO. You can read about the full release in the Update 10 release notes.

We are so excited to reach our tenth update since Visual Studio 2015 RTM – We couldn’t do it without your support and feedback! Thank you for all of your direct emails, discussions on Stack Overflow, and feedback shared on our documentation site.

Linda Zhong, Program Manager, Visual Studio Client Tools Team Linda is new to the Tools for Apache Cordova team, but not new to the trials and tribulations of mobile development. She spends her time thinking about how to make the VS Cordova user experience really rock!

We’re refreshing the Pluralsight course list for Visual Studio subscribers on July 1, 2016!

As you may know, Pluralsight is a benefit included with your Visual Studio (MSDN) Subscription. They are a global leader in high-quality online training for developers. Pluralsight provides on-demand access to rich collection of expert-led courses, training exercises, and more.

For Visual Studio subscribers, we periodically update the course selection based on subscriber demand to bring you fresh and relevant courses on a wide range of subjects from Azure to Machine Learning.

This means that some of the current courses will be removed to make room for the new ones. If you’re interested in any of the current courses, we recommend you to take them before June 30, 2016. If you haven’t activated your Pluralsight benefit, go to your subscription portal now. Here is a list of courses we will be removing after June 30^th and the new courses we will be adding in place of them.

Visual Studio Professional, Test Pro, Enterprise and MSDN Platforms subscriptions:

Visual Studio Enterprise and MSDN Platforms subscriptions only:

Pluralsight is one of the many benefits for Visual Studio subscribers. To see the complete list or to buy a subscription, go to the Visual Studio Subscriber Benefits page.

Enjoy!

Shawn Nandi, Senior Director – Developer Programs, Partnerships and PlanningShawn drives partnerships and planning for the developer business at Microsoft as well as product management for Visual Studio developer programs and subscriptions.

Whether you’re working on a side project with some friends or developing enterprise software, odds are you’re using source control. With the advent of open source software and collaboration, source control is an increasingly important part of the developer workflow. We’ve spent the last two updates working to improve the source control experience within Visual Studio and we’re not done yet!

We strive to accommodate all the various source control providers our users use and work to maintain extensible features. To this end, we’ve created a few new additions that should help developers be more productive when working with source control, regardless of their provider.

We think getting your projects into source control is pretty important and should be a snap so we’ve added a Publish button in Update 2 to help get your code pushed up to whichever host you choose. Out of the box, you can publish code into Visual Studio Team Services but GitHub and other source control hosts are already updating their extensions to support publishing to their own sites.We’ve been working on bringing more source control information to the surface to help you keep track of where you are, what’s changed and allow you quick access to your most frequent source control actions. As of Update 2, these new controls are fully extensible, allowing them to be customized for each provider’s needs. Git support comes baked in, allowing you to quickly publish a Git repository and keep an eye on your branch, uncommitted changes and unpublished commits, while AnkhSVN will be adding support in an upcoming release of their extension.

We’ve seen incredible growth in Git usage in recent months with nearly 60% of solutions under source control utilizing Git! As a result, we’ve made some investments specifically for Git users. Involved with many projects? Never worry about running out of space with unlimited Git repositories from Visual Studio Team Services!

With the latest update to the Changes page in Team Explorer, we have simplified the workflow for commits. Simply enter a commit message and hit Commit All to save a snapshot of all your changes. Want finer control? We now support staged and unstaged files so you can commit a specific set of changed files.

Switch between Visual Studio and the command line for Git actions? Now you don’t have to worry about losing context or mismatched information. With Team Explorer’s new Git interoperability, any actions taken on the command line will be immediately reflected in Team Explorer and vice versa.

Source control is more important than ever and we aim to deliver features that will delight and enable you to be at your most productive. We love to hear your feedback on our current features and what we can do to improve your experience for the future. Please feel free to reach out to Allison at Allison dot Buchholtz-Au at microsoft dot com for comments and suggestions.

Allison Buchholtz-Au, Program Manager, Visual Studio Platform Allison is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Platform team, focusing on streamlining source control workflows and supporting both our first and third party source control providers.

Apache Cordova applications leverage HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create mobile applications that run across multiple device platforms including Android, iOS, and Windows. Today, the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO) support in Visual Studio helps you get up and running quickly using Cordova. Cordova developers are web developers, and so a lot of Cordova developers start off with using the browser as a way to quickly preview and tweak their applications. In this post, we’re announcing a new browser-based simulator for Cordova developers, which we’re introducing first in Visual Studio Code.

Ionic serve is one popular option used by many developers. Combined with its –lab option, the browser displays preview for Android, iOS, and Windows devices. However, developers still have to comment out their plugin specific code as they start adding device capabilities.

Ripple is another alternative that supports plugin simulation. Unfortunately, Apache Ripple has been retired as an Apache project. Our team has forked Ripple and continues to fix bugs in the project to ensure that developers already using Ripple do not experience disruptions.

As we continue to invest in a browser based workflow, we noticed opportunities to make it better. We wanted to combine the best of Ionic Serve and Ripple, and we are pleased to announce an open source project in collaboration with Intel. This project is now integrated into the latest release of Visual Studio Code and we are working on adding it to Visual Studio.

Like Ripple, it supports simulation of common plugins in addition to live-reload and changing the screen size to test responsive design. It also has the following additions:

• When using an unknown plugin with Ripple, a dialog called “I Haz Cheezburger” is displayed where the developer manually enters the value that the plugin should return. This happens for every call in an unknown plugin. We now have a “persist” option that lets you enter this just once, and this value is reused.
• Plugin simulation is now extensible; a plugin author or the IDE using the project can define the user interface panel that is displayed to enable a developer to change the result from the plugin.
• Unlike Ripple, the application is not displayed in an iFrame. The application is in its own browser window, making debugging easier and removing any side effects that an iFrame may have.

You can start using it now! Install Visual Studio Code if you haven’t already, and then install the Cordova Tools extension. If you do already have the Cordova Tools extension, simply update the extension and this feature should show up in the debug options. If you already have an existing project, you may need to delete the launch.json file, and generate it again.

The team is working on adding support for even more plugins and if you believe that there is a common plugin that should show up in the panels, please find us on twitter. Our team is also working on porting this experience over to Visual Studio and is conducting user studies to determine the best user interface that we can present. If you have opinions on how this should look in Visual Studio, we would love to talk to you. Please send me an email at panarasi [at] microsoft [.] com.

Parashuram N, Program Manager, Visual Studio @nparashuram Parashuram is a Program Manager in the Visual team and works on building developer tools for JavaScript based mobile runtimes like Cordova and ReactNative. He is also a committer and a member in the Apache Cordova PMC.

For those of you who have been closely tracking the progress of our next release of Visual Studio (codenamed Visual Studio “15”), you’ll know that one of our big product release themes is installation and update. We are refactoring our installation to be smaller by default, faster and more reliable, and easier to manage, as described in this previous blog post:

Faster, Leaner, Focused on Your Development Needs: The New Visual Studio Installer

At //build, we shipped our first experimental preview of the new installation experience, with the smallest “core editor” payload for Visual Studio weighing in at about 320MB on disk. This release (and the Preview 2 that followed) included a few targeted experiences – .NET desktop, Python, C++ and Unity – that gave us early feedback about the approach. The teams are now converting other tooling components of Visual Studio to the new low-impact installation model so that we can ultimately switch out the ‘classic’ installer for our new experience and setup engine.

Installation Experience

Setup is probably the only experience that every Visual Studio customer shares, and we want a lot of feedback on it before we finalize the design. Later this summer, we’re going to have a version of Visual Studio “15” with the new installer UI. Before that comes out, though, we have something else to share with you – something we don’t normally share: our rough UI mockups. These are what we call “blue lines.” Like blueprints, these aren’t high fidelity mockups. They’re a little better than wireframes, and they give us a sense of the various paths customers might take through a UI. We’d like to ask you to step through the mockups and take our short survey to give feedback.

Choose Your Stack, Get a Tailored Install

Something else we’d like feedback on: the “workloads” that we’re aggregating together. Visual Studio will always have an advanced setup option where you can install features at a pretty granular level, and in Visual Studio “15” we’ll give you even more control than you have in VS today. But most often, customers tell us they just want to install C++ for desktop development or C# for web development – a “workload.”

We’ve been doing research into what the right collection of workloads should be, and we’ve come up with the following:

1. Universal Windows Platform development
2. Web development (incl. ASP.NET, TypeScript, Azure tooling)
3. Windows desktop app development with C++
4. Cross-platform mobile development with .NET (incl. Xamarin)
5. .NET desktop application development
6. Linux and IoT development with C++
7. Cross-platform mobile development with Cordova
8. Mobile app development with C++ (incl. Android, iOS)
9. Office / SharePoint add-in development
10. Python web development (incl. Django and Flask support)
11. Data science and analytical applications (incl. R, F#, Python)
12. Node.js development
13. Cross-platform game development (incl. Unity)
14. Native Windows game development (incl. DirectX)
15. Data storage and processing (incl. SQL, Hadoop, Azure ML)
16. Azure cloud services development and management
17. Visual Studio extension development

So how does all this come together? Here’s an early, work-in-progress preview of how we think this will look:

One final note. Normally, we ask for you to give feedback in comments to the blog post or through Connect or some other system. This time, we’re really asking everyone to use the survey, so we can further refine and improve our approach in a systematic way. Thanks!

Tim Sneath, Principal Lead Program Manager, Visual Studio Platform Tim leads a team focused on Visual Studio acquisition and extensibility. His mission is to see developers create stunning applications built on the Microsoft platform, and to persuade his mother that her computer is not an enemy. Amongst other strange obsessions, Tim collects vintage releases of Windows, and has a near-complete set of shrink-wrapped copies that date back to the late 80s.

[UPDATED July 15^th – New patch is now available to fix some top bugs in Update 3. Check Update July 15th tag]
[UPDATED June 30^th – See update tag within the post for details]

Today we are sharing the final release of Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 3, and .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0.

I’m going to start with .NET Core and ASP.NET Core. If you’ve not been following the .NET blog or the WebDev blog, .NET Core is a cross-platform, open source, and modular .NET platform for creating modern web apps, microservices, libraries and console applications that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This release includes the runtime and libraries for .NET Core and ASP.NET Core and a new set of command line tools, as well as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions that enable developers to work with .NET Core projects. The tooling will be at release quality with the next major release of Visual Studio, Visual Studio “15.”

Switching to VS Update 3, normally, I’d share some of the highlights of this release here, but over the past few months we’ve been working to improve our release notes and known issues so they are much more readable and approachable (and complete). So rather than using this post to talk about a bunch of the changes, I want to share a story about hunting down some memory issues in VS.

This is really a tale of two customers – both reasonably large and successful companies who’ve been using VS for many years. Both had reached out to us with saying they were having problems with sluggishness and stability when dealing with solution files containing 100s of projects and millions of files. One customer, for example, had a solution file with 500 projects (all .NET), which was making VS hang and crash from anywhere within five to 60 minutes of opening a solution. Another customer had a solution file with 200 projects (mostly .NET, but a handful of C++ projects). Though this project would load successfully, it was consuming a lot of CPU cycles, causing the IDE to be very sluggish while editing code, and the customer also experienced random crashes.

On the surface, these might look like very related issues. But they weren’t. As we talked with the customers and debugged their solutions, it became clear that the root causes were pretty different. Here are some of the things we learned and what we changed:

• We had tuned the algorithm for releasing cached project information to one particular shape of solutions (basically mid-sized .NET-only solutions)
• Some cached project information was simply retained for too long, regardless of the solution.
• VS enabled high-impact features like full code scanning in all cases, rather than allowing users to select whether they wanted them on or not.
• When VS would fire events aimed at multiple projects in a solution, VS wouldn’t properly batch them; it processed them one by one.
• VS would sometimes promote metadata references to project-to-project (P2P) references for a better experience; however, for some customers (those with complex P2P reference chains, or with post-build steps that modify binaries), this was actually degrading performance.

These problems turned out to be quite complex, often involving engineers from five or six feature teams to diagnose and fix them. That took time – our time and, more importantly, the customers’ time. I want to take a second here to thank both of these customers (you know who you are) for their patience and willingness to let us take a look at their projects.

All of these fixes (and more) are in Update 3; please take a look at the release notes and known issues for the full list.

[Updated June 30^th:  Thanks to some of you early adopters, we were able to fix or offer workarounds for some installation issues that were affecting a small percentage of users, including the inability to install Update 3 and not being able to create or load UWP projects.  Other fixes to other product issues are in the works and will be available soon.  Please refer to the known issues for details.]

[Update July ^15th: A new patch is now available to apply on top of Update 3. If you downloaded Update 3 after July 12th, you will automatically get the patch, if you downloaded Update 3 before July 12th then please apply this patch to get the latest fixes on Update 3]

To learn more about other related downloads, see the Downloads page. You can also access the bits and release notes right now on an Azure-hosted VM. You should be able to install this update on top of previous installations of Visual Studio 2015.

As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Report a Problem option in Visual Studio. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio @JohnMont John is responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, and .NET. John has been at Microsoft for 17 years, working in developer technologies the whole time.