Improved UWP Support, Bug Fixes Rolled into Latest Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 -- Visual Studio Magazine

Improved UWP Support, Bug Fixes Rolled into Latest Visual Studio 2015 Update 2

An updated .NET Native toolchain, Universal Windows SDK Picker, and improved Store Package Wizard are a handful of new features in a recent rollup of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2.

By Michael Domingo
04/13/2016

Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 might have been released a few weeks ago, but updates are now a constant of the current software rev world. Here's an example: Just this week, the team says it has released a new version of the Universal Windows Platform tools that, according to a VS Team blog, " includes our most significant update to .NET since the first release of these tools." Of significance is the release of an updated .NET Native toolchain and a Nuget package supporting Windows 10.

The updated .NET Native toolchain is numbered 23914.00 and the team says it contains well over 600 fixes for issues reported by customers, as well as "several optimizations to improve the build throughput for .NET Native compilation in VS," writes Navit Saxena, a Microsoft Senior Program Manager with XAML Experiences, in the blog.

Saxena also notes an update to the Microsoft.NETCore.UniversalWindowsPlatform 5.1.0 nuget package for targeting UWP.

Developers will also notice two other new features: a Universal Windows SDK Picker, and improvements to the Store Package Wizard.

With the Universal Windows SDK Picker, which is set through a project's application properties, developer can configure their Universal Windows Projects for a specific target build, via a Target Version drop-down, which when set allow projects to use APIs that are compatible with a specific Windows build. Minimum version is another configuration option that, when set, will specifiy the oldest version of the UWP platform that projects are able to run on.

The Store Package Wizard offers a streamlined improvement in the way it persists appx package configurations during app creation. In the Create App Packages wizard, there's now an option to save a package without having to sign in to the Universal Store.

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