Microsoft continues to deliver steady improvements to the forthcoming VS2015 as demonstrated in its regular previews. Beyond the usual bug fixes, the release of Community Technology Preview 5 (CTP5) adds new features for debugging and diagnostics, ASP.NET 5 enhancements, and TypeScript 1.4.
A new Diagnostic Tools window is available while debugging, allowing for the analysis and review of Debugger Events, Memory, and CPU utilization. This enhanced tool is available for several project types including Managed WPF, WinForms, Console, and ASP.NET 4 using IIS. Notably projects for ASP.NET 5, 64-bit Windows Store apps, JavaScript, and those running on a remote device or phone are not supported at this time but are expected to be in a future release.
The architecture supporting XAML editing has been rebuilt on top of Roslyn, to make future langauge additions easier. The editing for ASP.NET 5 has been further improved with some of additional quality of life improvements. Previously Add Reference only supported ASP.NET 5 projects, but now standard C# projects can be added. IntelliSense continues to receive refinement, and the Task Runner Explorer added support for Grunt and Gulp.
CTP5 bundles in the release of TypeScript 1.4. The first addition is changes to the type system that adds union types, type aliases, and const enums. The development team plans full ECMAScript 6 support for TypeScript 2.0, and has begun installing support for this incrementally. Adding to the previous targets of ES3 and ES5, is one for ES6.
Full details for CTP5 are available in the release notes. Note that while VS2015 Preview is available in fully localized for selected languages, using CTP5 will revert to English only.
