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Visual Studio 2017 v15.9 Preview 3 Improves Xamarin, TypeScript, More
Microsoft announced the third preview of Visual Studio 2017 v15.9, improving Xamarin and TypeScript functionality along with a bevy of other improvements.
For mobile developers, Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin gets new support for Xcode 10, Apple's IDE for creating iOS 12 apps to run on a variety of devices. Just released a few weeks ago, Xcode 10 provides new functionality such as Siri shortcuts (quicker ways to do common tasks).
"iOS 12 adds Siri Shortcuts, allowing all types of apps to expose their functionality to Siri," Microsoft's, Angel Zhou program manager, Visual Studio, said in a post last week. "Siri then learns when certain app-based tasks are most relevant to the user and uses this knowledge to suggest potential actions via shortcuts."
On the Android front, Visual Studio now supports Xamarin.Android 9.1 and its associated initial build performance improvements. More details on those improvements is available in the post Build Performance Results.
Beyond the mobile arena, Visual Studio beefed up its TypeScript/JavaScript functionality. "We now support project references, which provide functionality for splitting a large TypeScript project into separate builds that reference each other," Zhou said. "We have additionally rolled out the ability to easily update your project to the latest TypeScript 3.0 with our file renaming feature that also integrates project references. Now, if you rename your JavaScript or TypeScript file, the language service offers to fix references across your project."
Another notable update now allows for ARM64 support for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications. More details on that and other new functionality -- including a C++ Standard Library update -- can be found in the full release notes.
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David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.