What's New in Visual Studio 2017 15.6 -- Visual Studio Magazine

What's New in Visual Studio 2017 15.6

By David Ramel
03/06/2018

Microsoft shipped Visual Studio 2017 15.6 yesterday, with improved performance -- especially in solution load times -- topping the list of new features and enhancements.

Visual Studio 2017 15.6 was shipped nearly three months to the day after version 15.5, following seven preview releases.

A common thread of those previews was improving the performance, with yesterday's release continuing that effort with a focus on loading large C# and Visual Basic solutions, an initiative in the works since a Nov. 20 v15.5 preview.

"In 15.6, we continued improving solution load performance, specifically for scenarios when design time build results are cached," Microsoft said. "Large C# and Visual Basic solutions will load twice as fast as before when a solution has already been opened on a machine."

.NET core solutions, meanwhile, also received a solution load time boost, measured in the lab at about 20 percent faster.

Also on the performance front, the IDE will provide warnings about installed extensions that slow solution load times or otherwise bog down the UI.

"In order to provide more transparency around extensions' impact on performance and reliability, Visual Studio performs real-time analysis to determine whether an extension is likely to have caused unresponsiveness," Microsoft said. "If an extension is determined to have caused the hang, Visual Studio will display a notification which allows the user to disable the suspect extension or suppress future notifications for that extension."

Among a host of other new features are improvements to F# for functional programming, especially for .NET Core SDK solutions. While F# is newer than its C# and Visual Basic brethren, it's seeing more usage as functional programming is made more popular by frameworks such as React and React Native.

"A lot of improvements went into F# and its tools for this release," Microsoft said. "The most significant of them are related to .NET Core SDK projects. As always, significant contributions from the community came together here, as well."

Those F# improvements affect the compiler and core library improvements, tooling, infrastructure and more.

These changes were welcomed on the Reddit social coding site, where one developer said, "the list of FSharp improvements is amazing."

Dozens of other new features, improvements and bug fixes affect C++ programming, Python, Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin, debugging and diagnostics, VS Web tools, Team Explorer, UWP tools, Build tools and many more.

You can read more about all of the above and more in comprehensive detail in the release notes.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.