Visual Studio 2017 has been officially released to developers, the culmination of a development process that began with the first preview that was made publicly available on March 2016. One year later, VS2017 brings a new workflow-based installer, and improved support for mobile and cloud application development. DevOps support has been expanded to make deploying to Azure and Docker containers easier from within the IDE.
InfoQ has been covering the development cycle of VS2017 since its first announcement, but it is worth highlighting some of the features that VS2017 offers developers. Historically, Visual Studio has been designed to work with its own set of solution and project files. While this simplifies software projects that maintain their entire existence within Visual Studio, it is challenging to work with those projects developed outside of it. VS2017 lets developers open any folder on disk as though it were a traditional VS project, but does not require those metadata files to exist.
Complementing this feature is support for C++ projects that use the CMake build system. Given VS2017 has greater support for cross-platform support projects, being able to use these non-VS build systems is key to simplifying cross-platform development teams.
Newly added to the Enterprise edition is Redgate Data Tools, including ReadyRoll Core, SQL Prompt Core, and SQL Search. The third, SQL Search, is also available for users of VS2017 Professional and Community editions. Another Enterprise-only feature is the addition of Live Unit Testing. As previously reported, this feature will show the results from unit tests as they are being written compared to the previous state which ran tests after a build was performed.
Visual Studio 2017 is available for download in Community, Professional, and Enterprise editions. Full release notes have been provided for those seeking full details. VS2017 can be installed side-by-side with previous versions of Visual Studio, but the production release cannot be installed next to preview or RC versions of VS2017. Fortunately, those pre-release versions of VS2017 can be updated in-place.
