We recently released the third Preview of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 and we would love to get your feedback! We’ve been working hard to polish up some features, address some of the issues you’ve reported, and make meaningful improvements in the product’s fundamentals such as reliability, performance, and accessibility. For details of all the goodness contained in this Preview, check out the Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 Preview Release Notes. A few of the notable highlights include:
- Continuous Delivery Tools can now automatically build and deploy NET or ASP.NET Core projects to Azure Web App Services. This means that developers can create and configure a CI Build Definition and a Release Definition for their solution on Visual Studio Team Services without leaving the Visual Studio IDE.
- Increased visibility on extensions’ impact on Visual Studio reliability. Visual Studio has a rich ecosystem of tools and extensions that provide useful functionality to developers. But sometimes, extensions’ interactions with Visual Studio can have bugs. We already provide some diagnostics via an infobar that lets you know if an extension is slowing things down. Now, the diagnostic system has been extended to let you know if an extension may have been involved if ever VS terminates unexpectedly.
- Lightweight solution load (LSL) has been extended to large C++ solutions, which means that these types of projects will load faster.
If you’re not familiar with Visual Studio Previews, please take a moment to read the brief Visual Studio 2017 Release Rhythm. Remember that Visual Studio 2017 Previews install side by side with released bits, so they should not impact your machine. Previews provide an opportunity for you to receive fixes faster and to try out upcoming functionality before it becomes mainstream. Similarly, the Previews enable the Visual Studio Engineering team to validate usage and detect flaws earlier in the development process. This means that we are highly attuned to feedback coming in through the Previews. It’s a virtuous win-win cycle.
Install the Visual Studio 2017 Preview today, exercise your favorite piece of functionality, and tell us what you think. You can log bugs via Report a Problem in the IDE or share a suggestion on UserVoice. You can track the bugs you log on the developer community portal.
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Christine Ruana, Principal Program Manager, Visual Studio
Christine is on the Visual Studio release engineering team and is responsible for making Visual Studio releases available to our customers around the world. Co-incidentally, she is celebrating her 25th year with Microsoft today. |