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Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0 Out Now

Finalized versions of Microsoft's venerable software technologies are now generally available, and for Visual Studio 2015 U3, it includes the resolution of some high memory consumption issues that bedeviled some larger VS customers.

• By Michael Domingo
• 06/27/2016

Microsoft's Visual Studio and .NET Web Development groups anounced finalized versions of Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 and .NET Core and ASP.NET Core versions 1.0 early Monday. The company had been expected to release gold code versions before the month closed out.

The Visual Studio release as usual includes Team Foundation Server 2015, which provides for enterprise-level services for testing, source code control, and build management. John Montgomery, Microsoft's director of program management for Visual Studio, in a blog, writes about two key issues that beguiled the VS team over the past several months leading up to the release: performance and stability. Two large customers using Visual Studio in particular had the issues.

"Both had reached out to us with saying they were having problems with sluggishness and stability when dealing with solution files containing 100s of projects and millions of files," wrote Montgomery. "One customer, for example, had a solution file with 500 projects (all .NET), which was making VS hang and crash from anywhere within five to 60 minutes of opening a solution. Another customer had a solution file with 200 projects (mostly .NET, but a handful of C++ projects)."

The issues seeme related, Montgomery said, but some investigation led to the identification of two distinct and complex issues that took months to resolve, as well as "engineers from five or six feature teams to diagnose and fix them," said Montgomery. The resulting issues have been resolved, he said, and have been incorporated into U3.

There are a slew of improvements and enhancements, which are listed in the release notes. Some highlights: Tools for Apache Cordova 10; Developer Analytics Tools 7.0.2; Diagnostics Tools support; Tools for Universal Windows Apps, with support for UWP apps that use .NET Native 1.4; inclusion of Node.js 1.2 RC; support for TypeScript 1.8.34; inclusion of Xamarin 4.1, to name a few.

.NET Core, ASP.NET Core, and Entity Framework Core 1.0 have also been released well under the self-imposed deadline of end of June. The releases comes with a renaming/reversioning of the Web framework tools to 1.0 that was done back in early January this year to reflect the massive rewriting and optimizing of the code base.

"As part of this release we are making ASP.NET leaner, more modular, cross-platform, and cloud optimized," writes Jeffrey T. Fritz, Microsoft's senior program manager for the developers outreach group, in a blog announcing it. As such, he said to consider this a true version 1.0 solution that still has room for improvement and enhancement. "Features like SignalR and Web Pages will come later in the year and other features like Web Forms which are deeply tied to System.Web will remain in the .NET 4.x framework."

The releases include the release of the .NET Standard Library, which enables the solutions to be cross-platform enabled. The 1.0 solutions also already support Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Open Shift. Coincidentally, Microsoft officially announced the 1.0 solutions at the Red Hat Summit taking place in San Francisco this week. (An on-demand feed of Microsoft's announcement is available here on the Channel 9 site.)

Versions of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 10 can be downloaded at this link; there are versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Docker available there. It's also included in the tooling options that can be installed as part of VS 2015 U3, which is available here.