Microsoft has announced the release of Visual Studio 2015 Update 3. As we have previously discussed, the third planned update to Visual Studio 2015 addresses a wide range of issues. One of the goals of Update 3 is to reduce the high levels of memory used by the IDE.
The Diagnostic Tools have been updated to support apps running on OneCore devices—meaning devices like the HoloLens and Raspberry Pi platform are better supported for development.
The licensing and subscription issues that can occur with VS2015 have been addressed in an effort by Microsoft to make these areas more user-friendly. A big change with Update 3 is that it is no longer required to re-authenticate with licensing servers every 8 days in order to keep account personalization settings active.
There have been several performance and conformance improvements regarding both the C++ compiler and C++ language libraries bundled with VS2015. The full list of these changes is detailed in the release notes. Those using C# and Visual Basic are not forgotten, as Update 3 attempts to fix several items causing out-of-memory errors. A progress bar will appear when applying ‘fix all’ changes to your code- useful feedback when dealing with larger projects.
VS2015’s source code management area, Team Explorer, has had several bug fixes made which will be very helpful to those using Git with VS2015. Continuing the theme of this update, memory consumption and stability fixes are addressed.
Update 3 is available with a download link to web installer and the full offline ISO. Note that it is possible to download and run the web installer locally with the /Layout option to produce your own copy of the installation files. Full release notes are available as is the current list of known issues with this release.