Following a recent spate of release candidates, Microsoft has begun final preparations for the formal release of Visual Studio 2017. Microsoft has announced that March 7, 2017 will be the official release date for VS2017. This release marks the 20th anniversary of the original release of Visual Studio in 1997 which in those days included Visual J++, Visual FoxPro, and Visual InterDev along with Visual C++.
In preparation for formal release, Microsoft is still working to finish VS2017 and the latest RC -seemingly the last before formal launch- focuses on several bug fixes with only a few new features of note. The first new item focuses on .NET Core with the inclusion of the “dotnet new” templating engine. The other new feature is the inclusion of the Redgate SQL Prompt which is intended to provide code completion capabilities when working with SQL.
The remainder of this RC focuses on several bug fixes of various severity. Developers who work with Visual Studio extensions (VSIX projects) will find several fixes that are of importance to fix debugging and build issues with those projects. Several different bugs that affect .NET Core and ASP.NET Core have been addressed, fixing numerous bugs dealing with saving project files, NuGet, and the command line tools.
Full release notes for build 26206 (released February 7) are available which provide complete details on the changes made for this release. Developers may obtain this release by either updating from within an existing copy of VS2017RC or downloading the installer from Microsoft.