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Visual Studio '15 preview 4

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39 pointstonyjstark23 comments

A bit off topic, but I wish MSFT would come up with a better codename. The need for quotation marks around "15" in every single post I've seen about this new version of Visual Studio should be an indicator of why that is necessary ;)

As far as I can tell these are the current VS products with version numbers and codenames:

* Visual Studio Code

* Visual Studio Team Services (formerly know as Visual Studio Online)

* Visual Studio 2015 / version 14.0 / codename Dev14

* Visual Studio "15" Preview N / version 15.0 / codename Dev15/vNext?

Visual Studio Code has nothing to do with Visual Studio proper other than the name, the logo and the fact that both are Microsoft projects. It's a pretty good text editor, actually - it's my Go IDE, thanks to the vscode-go plugin.

I just wish they hadn't named it like that, as it's a pain to open it (and Visual Studio) on Microsoft's own OS: if I want to open either of them, I'll begin to type "visual" after pressing Start, press enter... and with a bit of luck, it will be the "Visual Studio" I wanted to open. Worse is when I'm on it, and the guess doesn't change until I begin to type "Code" after typing the first two words. Really frustrating. So Microsoft's problem with names goes beyond codenames...

Can't you just type "Code"? I'm not on a Windows 10 machine at the moment so I can't confirm it there, but it works on Windows 7 and I doubt Microsoft would go backwards in that regard.

Indeed, that works, thank you :) I had previously tried "vscode" and other variations, but it appears the executable name is the super-generic Code.exe. There's still the problem of VS Code opening when I wanted VS, but for this case I'll try to use "devenv" instead.

Small trick for the search issue: Add a start menu shortcut with the name "vscode" to make it show up when you search for "vs"

VS "15" is just the 15th version of visual studio (well 14 since they skipped 13). Internally there are a lot of folders named xx14 for Visual Studio 2015 (which was VS "14" until it got the name Visual Studio 2015) and the version number of the version I'm running is 14.0.23108.0 which starts with 14.

I agree it's pretty confusing because we're in the 2000s and the version number and the year are similar, but it's consistent and makes some amount of sense.

I'm counting 11 versions on Wikipedia[0], but that may be wrong and I'm not sure as I've only worked with VS since Visual Studio 2008 (aka version 9.0, released in 2007) :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio#Histor...

You have to go to the Visual C++ page to see the rest, as Visual Studio was borne out of Visual C++ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_C%2B%2B

Visual Studio releases generally aren't named until closer to launch.

Visual Studio "15" will most likely end up being called Visual Studio 2017 when it launches, but, until the marketing drones do their thing closer to launch, it doesn't have an official name. Hence the "15" in scare quotes.

(You saw the same thing for 2015/"14" and 2012/"11"; 2013 had a short enough cycle that it had its name throughout its preview cycle.)

You're right, I guess I'd just prefer if they consistently used the version number in VS product names (the IDE/Windows-only edition).. It's a boring nitpick though and for that I'm sorry - but I actually think this might hurt their pre-release marketing efforts since people unaware of VS internal version numbers probably don't realize that "Visual Studio '15'" is different from "Visual Studio 2015".

Visual Studio Code is not really related to the core VS project. It's branded this way I think to improve consumer confidence but it's not related. It's weird to include this in the same list as the others.

Someday, I'd love to see an x64 Visual Studio. I've read the arguments (there's two canonical blog posts about it), but I'm just really sick of it hitting the memory limits on a 32-bit process all the time, when I have another 12 - 28 GB of RAM sitting unused.

VS 2015 update 3 has reduced the memory usage a lot, may help if you don't have it yet.

I'm curious; what are you working on exactly? I have worked on some rather large code bases in C++ and C# and have never seen VS eat that much memory.

For some reason, it tends to choke and die if you have open C#, JS and html/cshtml files at the same time. Particularly if you have multiple monitors, and drag some editor windows onto the other desktops. Having the WinForms or WPF designers open also tends to bring things to a crawl. I do also run ReSharper, which does not help things.

Routinely, I'll have open about 10-15 code files, that total up less than 1 MB, and Visual Studio will be chugging up 1.5 GB of memory, locking up for ten seconds when I go to type.

Interesting. I don't do front end stuff or web development, so I've never hit that scenario. Lots of files open and whatnot, but never an issue. I also dumped Resharper a while back due to it generally slowing everything down.

This is Visual Studio '15' (2017), not Visual Studio '15 (2015, v14).

See, if they just wrote v15 it would be a little clearer. Calling it "15" (in quotes! why?) is hopelessly confusing.

The title of this HN discussion should probably be changed from [Visual Studio '15 preview 4] to [Visual Studio “15” Preview 4], which is the actual name of the article and fixes the quotes to avoid 2015 confusion.

I had had Preview 3 with the old installer, and things (rustc, gyp, &c.) tended to work with just advising them about 15.0 in a similar fashion to how they used 14.0.

Alas, the new installer changes the techniques used to find things (there was an InstallDir registry key somewhere or other which is no more), so now for running things like rustc and gyp I need to either run vcvarsall.bat manually (rustc) or make invasive changes (gyp) before they’ll work.

In short: if you want to use this to actually develop things that aren’t purely Visual Studio projects, you’ll find it more convenient to wait.

Did you file a bug on the rustc issue? I'd like to get that fixed and/or even help get it fixed, by fixing the Rust toolchain.

I started talking it over with Peter Atashian (retep998, WindowsBunny, &c.).

> The highlight of this release is that nearly all of VS is running on the new setup engine, resulting in a smaller, faster and less impactful installation. The smallest install is less than 500 MB on disk (compared to 6GB in the previous release of Visual Studio).

I use some basic features VS occasionally on a Yoga ultrabook with a smallish SSD, this is great news!

The "Open Folder" à la Sublime/VSCode, TypeScript 2.0 beta are also cool.

Link to the full release note:

https://www.visualstudio.com/news/releasenotes/vs15-relnotes

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