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Microsoft Offers Visual Studio 2019 Release Candidate
The Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2019 has been made available in anticipation of the official launch coming April 2.
As one of the final steps before that launch, the release candidate was made available in a release channel, while a new Visual Studio 2019 Preview 4 is available in the preview channel.
Those two editions can be installed and put through their paces side-by-side, and after the April 2 launch, the release channel's build can be updated to the generally available (GA) release, all set for production use.
"With today's releases, we encourage you to install either Visual Studio 2019 RC side-by-side with your existing Preview installation, or start using the RC if you haven't checked out the Preview releases," Microsoft's John Montgomery, director of program management, Visual Studio, said in a blog post today (Feb. 28). "Visual Studio 2019 RC, as was the case with RCs of previous versions of Visual Studio, is a supported release and comes with a go-live license, but keep in mind that we're still finalizing things and some workloads remain in preview until April 2."
The various editions of Visual Studio (Community, Professional and Enterprise) will ship with different features, and the company called out two newer features in the Enterprise edition:
- The Snapshot Debugger, which enables you to debug production applications in Azure with minimal disruption, adds support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS).
- In a future release, Visual Studio Enterprise 2019 will add a preview of Time Travel Debugging (TTD) integrated with the Snapshot Debugger. TTD enables you to record a process and then accurately reconstruct and replay the execution path. You can rewind and replay each line of code however many times you want, helping you isolate and identify problems.
"For Visual Studio Community 2019, we're making the References, Application Insights (Requests and Exceptions), and Test (Test Status and Tested By) CodeLens capabilities available, which were only available in Visual Studio Professional and Enterprise previously," Montgomery said. "This means that any Visual Studio 2019 user can now get specific insights and information about the code, right within the code editor."
The RC release notes provide an exhaustive list of hundreds of tweaks, fixes, improvements, new features and so on.
"While our generally available release on April 2 only marks the beginning of Visual Studio 2019 releases, we still encourage everyone to install Visual Studio 2019 RC and help us ship the best of Visual Studio to date," Montgomery said. "Let us know of any issues you run into by using the Report a Problem tool in Visual Studio or head over to the Visual Studio Developer Community to track your issue or suggest a feature."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.