Microsoft continues to quickly iterate development of Visual Studio 2017, and has just released 15.5 Preview, a look at the company’s fifth update to the popular IDE since its release.
This preview debuts a new historical debugging feature called "Stepping Back". IntelliTrace automatically takes snapshots of application state on each step through breakpoints, giving developers the ability to navigate forward and back across their breakpoints. This makes it much easier to observe before and after affects.
Microsoft has made additional speed improvements to the loading of C# and Visual Basic based solutions. They report the smallest 50% of all solutions should load within 10 seconds. Similarly, C++ developers should observe significantly faster IntelliTrace performance when executing common commands like Rename, Change Signature, and Find All References.
In VS2017 15.4, C#, VB, and Python developers acquired the IDE ability "Control-Click" to go to an item’s definition. This function has now been added to C++ development. C++ Code generation has also been improved, and C++ projects affected by the changes should be able to benefit from the updates once recompiled under 15.5.
Developers with multiple copies of VS2017 installed (such as go-live VS2017 side-by-side with VS2017 Preview) will appreciate changes to the VS2017 installer. Windows restore points are now automatically created at installation time, and the Add & Remove Programs screen lists distinct entries for each copy of VS2017 installed.
As always with Preview releases, this should not be installed in a production environment. Full release notes are available which cover all of the changes contained in 15.5 Preview 1.