Today, we are making available a first community technology preview of the next version of Visual Studio, codenamed Visual Studio “14”. This early build is focused on enabling feedback and testing from the Visual Studio community. Visual Studio "14" will most likely be available sometime in 2015, with a more complete preview release and final naming available later this year. Given that this is a very early build, please install in a test environment with no earlier versions of Visual Studio installed.
You can read about the new features and known issues in this first Visual Studio “14” CTP, and also download today.
Over the last 3 months, we've announced many exciting technologies that will be important parts of Visual Studio "14" - including the "Roslyn" .NET compiler platform, ASP.NET vNext and Apache Cordova tooling. The Visual Studio "14" CTP 1 includes these tools, as well as many additional improvements across Visual Studio, including an early look at some new C++ 11 support that will be part of Visual Studio "14".
C# and VB with the .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn")
In Visual Studio "14", the C# and VB compilers and IDE support are fully built on the .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn"). This open-source compiler as a service now sits behind dozens of developer experiences in Visual Studio "14", powering build, IntelliSense, refactoring, CodeLens, debugging and many more features developers use every day. In most places the experiences are unchanged, but there have also been many small improvements across the entire development experience as part of the new compiler platform.
In the Visual Studio "14" preview C# refactoring support has been completely revamped including two new core refactorings: Inline Temporary Variable and Introduce Explaining Variable. Additionally, refactoring support for Visual Basic has been added for the first time.
Visual Studio "14" also supports APIs that come from NuGet with their own analyzers, squiggling issues in your code as you type and offering you automatic fixes, all powered by the .NET Compiler Platform.
You can read more about the new C# and VB developer experiences on the C# blog and the Visual Basic blog.
ASP.NET vNext
A few weeks ago, we announced ASP.NET vNext and plans for the future of .NET on the server. ASP.NET vNext is designed for both cloud and server, offering SxS installation options and significantly enhanced developer productivity, through a modular and highly configurable framework and web stack.
The Visual Studio "14" CTP offers an early look at the Visual Studio tooling experience for ASP.NET vNext. As well as the ASP.NET 4.5 Web Application templates, new templates are included for targeting ASP.NET vNext.
The next version of .NET that will be available along with Visual Studio "14" includes ASP.NET vNext as well as many additional new .NET technologies that we've previewed in recent month, including .NET Native for Windows Store apps, the next generation JIT, and the Roslyn compilers.
You can read more about ASP.NET vNext in the Visual Studio "14" CTP on the .NET Web Development and Tools blog.
C++ 11/14
We've continued to push forward on the standards conformance of the Visual C++ compiler. The Visual Studio "14" CTP includes support for user-defined literals, noexcept, alignof and alignas, and inheriting constructors from C++11, generalized lambda capture, auto function return type deduction, and generic lambdas from C++14, as well as many more new C++ features.
This continues with the roadmap we laid out last year on the path toward C++11 and C++14 standards compliance. The chart below is an updated view of what we know now, and the features that we're working on now for future Visual Studio "14" CTPs.
In addition, the Visual Studio "14" CTP include new features for debugging, libraries and IDE productivity.
You can read more about the C++ improvements in the Visual Studio "14" CTP on the C++ blog.
Summary
This early preview of Visual Studio "14" is an opportunity to gather feedback on the next version of Visual Studio and .NET. For developers picking up the CTP, I encourage you to share your feedback on the Connect website, or through Send-a-Smile in the Visual Studio IDE.
Namaste!