Today we released the next set of reliability and performance improvements in Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 RC, which also addresses issues that we hear from your continued feedback.
Building on what we announced with the CTP release, here’s what you’ll find in Update 2 RC:
- Issues we’ve fixed:
- Errors in the NuGet Package Manager Console that failed with “A task was canceled.”
- Crashes due to null and/or invalid pointer reads.
- Crashes some customers have encountered when opening a solution.
- Reduced licensing failures and more actionable information when failures occur.
- C++ projects load faster with improvements in UI delays.
- Promotion of MSBuild warning MSB3644 (“The reference assemblies for framework {0} were not found”) to error status so incorrect target frameworks that give rise to this error will break a build.
- Correction of problems in Visual Studio with ASP.NET after installing Update 2 CTP.
- C/C++ runtime library performance: we’ve improved the performance of a number of common operations. For example, extracting floating point numbers with iostreams is up to nineteen times faster. Certain string operations are also faster, especially std::string::replace when replacing same-sized substrings. Give it a try and let us know if you notice a difference.
As with the CTP, we’ve continued to ship additional features as covered fully in the release notes, such as NuGet 3.4 and C#/Visual Basic refactoring to make methods synchronous. A couple of others include:
- Visual Studio now shows Git SCC status in the status bar, and jumping to Changes, Sync, and Connect pages are just a single click away. This is all extensible by third party SCC providers.
- Visual Studio now supports consuming TextMate snippets with IntelliSense completion by placing tmSnippet files into a snippet folder.
- Improvements to the Application Insights search experience with the ability to jump to the code where a telemetry event was emitting, a search for related items, and a new experience to log data from apps.
Again, check the Description of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 RC for all the details.
We’ve also released Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2 RC 2 today. You can see what’s new there in the TFS Update 2 RC 2 release notes.
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 is the Director of Program Management for Visual Studio, 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 @JohnMont |