Microsoft Ships Final Minor Update to Visual Studio 2017 -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Ships Final Minor Update to Visual Studio 2017

By David Ramel
11/27/2018

Microsoft, already busy with the upcoming Visual Studio 2019, has shipped the final minor update to Visual Studio 2017, improving debugging, UWP development and more.

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 was made available this month, marking the final milestone (beyond some 15.9.x service updates) before the new major version of the flagship IDE is unveiled in 2019.

One area that received attention in v15.9 is Universal Windows Platform (UWP) development, which has been improved in several ways.

"The key ones are: support for the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (build 17763) SDK, the ability to build .msix installation packages in Visual Studio using the normal packaging tools for UWPs, support for ARM64, and performance and reliability improvements (particularly improvements to F5 performance and XAML designer reliability)," said John Montgomery, director of program management for Visual Studio, in a blog post last week.

Other highlights of VS 2017 v15.9 (now up to 15.9.2) include:

Support for "step back" debugging in C++ was added to the Enterprise edition, letting developers view an application's state at various times. This was previously available for C# development.
Support for TypeScript 3.1
Support for creating SharePoint 2019 projects, along with migrating 2013 and 2016 projects to the new 2019 project template.
Support for Apple's Xcode 10 IDE in Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin.
Several NuGet enhancements, including: credential provider, package manager improvements and security improvements.
A bevy of F# tweaks, affecting the language compiler, tools and setting the VisualFSharpFull project as the default startup project, eliminating the need to manually set that before debugging.

Developers using v15.0.x (RTM) have one year after the release of v15.9 to upgrade to continue to get support from Microsoft.

Last month, Microsoft's Paul Chapman said: "We also plan to release Visual Studio 2017 for Mac version 7.7 in the coming months, and a final significant update to Visual Studio 2017 for Mac (version 7.8) in the first half of 2019, focused primarily on quality improvements. Visual Studio for Mac continues to follow the Microsoft Modern Lifecycle Policy, and Visual Studio 2017 for Mac version 7.8 will be superseded by Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.0 once released."

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.

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