News
Visual Studio '14' CTP Released
It's a preview of the next version of the IDE, expected to hit in 2015.
Microsoft is already preparing its next major upgrade to Visual Studio, even though it doesn't expect to release it until 2015. But that didn't stop it from releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of what it has codenamed Visual Studio "14."
S. "Soma" Somasegar, vice president of the Developer Division, blogged that the CTP is a "very early build," and should only be installed in a test environment. At least one more release, along with the final name of the product, is coming "later this year," he said.
Visual Studio "14" CTP incorporates much of the functionality introduced at April's Build conference, starting with the .NET Compiler Platform, formerly codenamed "Roslyn." Roslyn, which was officially made open source at Build, makes the C# and Visual Basic compilers available as APIs.
Somasegar blogged that one of the biggest changes in the CTP is that C# refactoring support has been overhauled, including two new refactorings: Inline Temporary Variable and Introduce Explaining Variable. And in a nod to the fact that it still has a significant community of Visual Basic developers, refactoring support for VB was introduced.
Another upgrade involves a working version of ASP.NET vNext, a new .NET stack for Web application development. vNext is a composable stack in which ASP.NET MVC and Web API have been combined into a single development model. A Microsoft support article explains that because of its structure, changes to code can be seen in a browser, without going through a compiler. It also includes:
- Dependency injection out of the box
- Side-by-side: Deploy the runtime and framework by using your application
- NuGet everything, even the runtime itself
C++ also gets a lot of attention in Visual Studio "14" CTP, writes Somasegar:
"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."
In addition, the CTP includes the typical enhancements for things like debugging and libraries, although Somasegar didn't go into those details.
The announcement of Visual Studio "14" CTP comes close on the heels of the last major update, Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 CTP. And that followed the final release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 just 10 days prior.
About the Author
Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.