Announcing Visual Studio “15” Preview 5 | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Visual Studio “15” Preview 5

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

88 pointsvyrotek39 comments

If this make VS significantly faster and lighter, it might be the only thing keeping me from using it full time for Python development (that and Linux systems). It might actually be one of the best IDE's out there for Python. Autocomplete just works, vim bindings, debugging/stepping through code is easy as pie, pip and virtual environments all integrated...

https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/python/

I prefer PyCharm because it also checks coding style.

Then why don't you use Visual Studio on Linux?

Personally, that's what I do: Visual Studio Express 2010 for C# already works beautifully on my debian Jessie if you don't use dual screens.

I have to look at 2015 or the regular ("Pro") version of previous versions of Visual Studio, but there should be nothing unfixable.

By the way, if some good soul from Microsoft reads this and has a license to spare for Visual Studio Pro 2010, I'd be happy to check it works just as well :-) I have Microsoft Imagine but for some reason they don't give license for old version of VS

If you want to try Visual Studio Express 2010 C# with wine, my recipe is just below. (I have to submit it to the winetrick team one day)

If you want to use external dlls, don't forget to start Visual Studio with the prefix override WINEDLLOVERRIDES=fusion=n,ngen=n wine C:\....\VCSE.exe

###### Devereaux recipe for VS2010 C# on wine 1.8

# basics

winetricks windowscodecs corefonts

winetricks dotnet20 dotnet40

# To download prerequisites ; to make the properies tab work ; to help some tools

winetricks winhttp gdiplus mfc42

# To view help files

winetricks ie8_kb2936068

# Then simply install from publically availble ISO:

# download.microsoft.com/download/1/E/5/1E5F1C0A-0D5B-426A-A603-1798B951DDAE/VS2010Express1.iso

wine /mnt/VCSExpress/Setup.exe

# NB: Refuse Silverlight and SQL as it may fail.

# Then if you want, you can install SP1 from publically available ISO: # download.microsoft.com/download/E/B/A/EBA0A152-F426-47E6-9E3F-EFB686E3CA20/VS2010SP1dvd1.iso

wine /mnt/Setup.exe /passive

# NB: (must be passive, otherwise the splashscreen crashes)

Stuff like this is why I still can't bring myself to use Linux as my main development machine. That and some special tools that only work in Windows.

Lately however I have been developing like a hipster using Vim for all of my Python stuff.

I understand your point, it seems complicated.

But stuff like this is why I use Linux as my main development machine. I have a reproductible process, and a full and independant installation of every piece of software living in a ~/.wine-whatever directory - here .wine-visualstudio2010

If anything happens to my installation, I can either unpack a tarball of this directory (in a known-to-be-working state) on another machine, or rerun an automated version of my recipe and have whatever Windows software ready in a matter of minutes, automatically.

Laptops break, bad things happens. It can be a catastrophy when your time is tight.

Personally, I don't have time to spare to sit through an installation process, and dependencies, and click on EULA, etc. So I want things to work reliably, even if the initial setup takes a bit longer.

I love Microsoft software, but Windows is too fragile. I have a Windows partition and even a dedicated Windows machine. They usually work beautifully. ConEmu is so much better than all the X terminals I know. MSYS and bash from git are great development environments.

I just don't want to depend on Windows for anything too serious.

I hear ya, everyone has their ways that work for them. Once I see wine come up, I usually start to glaze over. Although honestly I still haven't given wine a fair try yet.

Don't get me wrong I love Linux and really wish I could use it as my main machine, but there are just some tools and interfaces I have to use on Windows since I do some hardware work as well with proprietary tools and all their own EULAs..

However the more I have been getting into web development lately the more Windows has become a pain to use for some tools and libraries.

So I just use VMs, Rasperry Pi's and pretend occasionally. Tried Cygwin for awhile, but it just not the same.

Conemu definitely rocks! However I somehow managed to merge the Windows Terminal and Cygwin in the same terminal by default which I have been unable to figure out... But at least I can use ls/dir interchangeably now, so I don't see it as a bad thing.

> By the way, if some good soul from Microsoft reads this and has a license to spare for Visual Studio Pro 2010, I'd be happy to check it works just as well :-) I have Microsoft Imagine but for some reason they don't give license for old version of VS

contact me deejaybog at live com

I really want to like the PVTS stuff, but I miss the great documentation display that Spyder offers

https://pythonhosted.org/spyder/help.html

In PVTS I'm constantly looking on the web at the NumPy docs at what a quick ctrl+I gives me in Spyder.

Run to Click. You no longer need to set a temporary breakpoint to skip ahead and stop on the line you desire. When stopped in the debugger, simply click the icon that appears next to the line of code your mouse is over. Your code will run and stop on that line the next time it is hit.

This looks like a great feature.

FYI. You can right click on a line and "Run to Cursor" in vs2015 and older versions.

Nice touch.

In my experience, Visual Studio 2013 is better than Visual Studio 2015 when working on ASP.NET. I get many errors in Razor files when on VS2015. All errors disappear when I clean and rebuild the whole project. I hope it gets better on the next version of Visual Studio.

Err how old is your version MVC your using. Could be they depreciated it?

i use ASP.NET MVC 5

I also found in some cases certain design-time errors go away by closing and re-opening Visual Studio. I used to pull my hair out trying to fix those errors; now if I get an error I don't understand it's a clean/rebuild cycle first and a close/reopen second.

I kind of feel VS is getting less stable as Microsoft embraces the packages-for-everything style that is pervasive in web development.

Indeed. I think a lot of the ASP.NET tooling (particularly around Razor) was rewritten in Visual Studio 2015. There are ton of bugs and other annoyances (for example: https://github.com/aspnet/Tooling/issues/116).

For VS 2013, there where a lot of great extensions for VS designed to improve the front end web development experience (ie. things like LESS, SASS, Typescript) and also nuget for managing client side JS/CSS libraries.

These became deprecated when 2015 rolled around, as the advice became to use more industry standard tools (node, gulp, grunt, etc) to accomplish the same tasks.

I understand the rationale, and use those tools now, but certain aspects are definitely more cumbersome now than they where a couple of years ago when you could just let VS take care of it.

Awesome. It takes so long to load vs 2015 and if I want to have two or three instances open simultaneously it absolutely kills my machine. Can't wait for this to come to the official release.

Is Visual Studio "15" using any parts of Linux subsystem on Windows for targeting or testing? Much interested if there is something interesting going on that end.

> Improved speed of Git source control operations by using git.exe

Can someone elaborate on this, how was it implemented in previous versions?

Presumably it was previous using libgit2 or libgit2sharp.

In fact, the README at https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 says:

  libgit2 is already very usable and is being used in production for many applications
  including the GitHub.com site, in Plastic SCM and also powering
  Microsoft's Visual Studio tools for Git.

Visual Studio really needs to drop the large but seldom release schedule. There are so many pieces that just need minor improvements, that must await for these gigantic day-to-install releases before they see light.

Saying that, I absolutely love VS just wish they actually managed to fix the update/release process.

enterprise does not like the rolling-release model.

They've been doing it for VS Code which is now my goto editor for anything not C++ or Java.

Not to mention each new release of Visual C++ for example require a new CRT etc with different file names.

I think they talked about this some time ago and that they were (slowly) moving away from new CRTs all the time.

>Starting with Visual Studio “14,” we will stop releasing new versions of the CRT with each release of Visual Studio. Whereas before we would have released msvcr140.dll in this forthcoming release, then msvcr150.dll in the next release, we will instead release one new CRT in Visual Studio “14” then update that version in-place in subsequent releases, maintaining backwards compatibility for existing programs.

From this post: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2014/06/10/the-great...

Outdated article I think

The roadmap has been built around major releases, with big updates to internals and major new features, a little less than every 2 years for a while (2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015).

But, there have been pretty substantial updates about every 4 months since about 2012 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio#2013 and https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/release-notes/). There's a balance between the stability and maintainability big enterprises often want and the feature updates developers (esp. in web and other fast moving segments) want. These updates usually include a lot of new features, pulled in as new VSIX extensions, updates to frameworks, etc., that can add a lot without blocking big corps by significantly changing the core (functionality or user experience). For example, here's the release notes on VS 2013.3: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2933779 - there's a ton of stuff, especially when you consider that all the sub-frameworks (e.g. ASP.NET Web API new release) require tooling updates and testing.

As a dev, I want new and shiny ASAP, and VS Code is definitely nice from that point of view. But from the VS point of view, I think the 4 month update cycle has been pretty fast.

Disclaimer: Microsoft employee, Nazgûl

The four month cycle isn't bad unless you are doing anything with JavaScript. There it seems like the four-month cycle slowly begins to pile up, and it makes the already impossible task of keeping up with the js-world even harder.

Thinking about it, if it weren't for JavaScript/JSX, I would be perfectly happy with the longer release cycle.

I'm with you there. For JS/JSX dev, I'm assuming you know about Mads Kristensen's Web Extension Pack (https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f3b504c6-0095...) and Node Tools for Visual Studio (https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/node-js/), right?

I was aware of NTVS but not the other, thank you! Although it's still hard to keep getting a full team to keep installing plugins ;).

> The four month cycle isn't bad unless you are doing anything with JavaScript.

Whether this is an argument against the Visual Studio's or Javascript's cycle is up to the reader to decide. :-)

30 seconds... 30. sigh.

This just isn't something to be happy about.

>loading the solution for the entire .NET Compiler Platform “Roslyn” 30 seconds with Visual Studio ‘15’ compared to 60 seconds with Visual Studio 2015

A 50% performance improvement isn't something to be happy about? How quickly should it be doing the loading of that specific set of files?

> How quickly should it be doing the loading of that specific set of files

Sub 500ms? Read the solution, read each project file, read the first level of file and folder names in each project, then show the solution explorer. Anything else can go in a background thread which doesn't block building, running, or opening individual files.

I would like to see where the other 29,500ms are going.

Precisely this. Crystal Reports used to (I don't even know if CR still exists, tbh) display each page of a report as it rendered it. This made the app very productive compared to every other reporting tool we tested (at the time). They all rendered ALL the pages before showing even the first. This is deplorable and anti-user.

Visual Studio should read in all the files, restoring to open the ones I had open last time and allow me to start editing immediately while still loading the rest in the background. Also, Intellisense data should be cached, because if the load time of 30 seconds is because it's prepping that each time, that's a waste.

> Visual Studio should read in all the files, restoring to open the ones I had open last time and allow me to start editing immediately while still loading the rest in the background.

It's already done this for a few versions -- a feature named 'asynchronous solution load'. You're able to open a file and start editing while the X hundreds of projects load. However if you do a Navigate To, Find In Files, etc. among other operations, you'll get the modal progress bar because those operations require having the entire solution parsed. But editing and other simple operations are available while the projects are loading (which takes up the bulk of the time).

edit: more info about asynchronous solution load: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2013/10/14/asy...

Compared to what that has the same functionality?

I think these changes are all commendable and I am greatly looking forward to them. However, as someone who spends a lot of time in Visual Studio every week, I generally will keep the same instance running for days and don’t even switch between projects too often. Load time doesn’t factor in too much, but I guess it's nice for demos. For quick one-off files, I’ve always used something light weight like Notepad++ and now more frequently VS Code.

What I am really looking forward to would be anything around speeding up install and patch times. These are excruciatingly slow in VS 2015.

For that example, they're showing Visual Studio opening the Roslyn repo (https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn). Without any package restore, that's 200MB / almost 12k files.

Keeping in mind that Visual Studio isn't a simple text editor, it's a code editor that provides code-based IntelliSense, extensions, integrated debugging, etc., I'd say 30 seconds isn't too bad, especially considering some websites these days take nearly that long to finish rendering.

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