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.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Azure AI Foundry Gets NVIDIA Tech

AI powerhouse NVIDIA flexed its muscle at its GTC 2025 conference this week where several partnerships with Microsoft were announced, mostly concerning Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry offering.
AI's Takeover of Software Development Gets a Name: 'Vibe Coding'

Microsoft's VS Code dev team rides the vibe.
.NET 10 Preview 2 Enhances Blazor, .NET MAUI

According to the release notes, however, most dev-team attention was devoted to small fixes, features and functionality, as was the case in Preview 1, which shipped a few weeks ago.
OpenSilver 3.2 Takes WPF Apps to Mobile with .NET MAUI Hybrid Integration

OpenSilver, an open-source, WebAssembly-based reimplementation of the deprecated Microsoft Silverlight, now supports .NET MAUI Hybrid for cross-platform web and native app development.
Neural Network Quantile Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of neural network quantile regression. The goal of a quantile regression problem is to predict a single numeric value with an assurance such as, "The predicted y value is 0.6789 and there's roughly a 90% chance the prediction will be greater than or equal to the true y value."