In looking at the release schedule of Visual Studio 2017's 15.3 Preview, Microsoft appears to be nearing formal release of this edition. The past few weeks of changes made to VS2017 15.3 Preview have focused solely on bug fixes, and looking at this latest preview of VS2017 15.3 developers can find support for C# 7.1, improvements to C++ language services, and a few changes to the IDE itself. This is augmented by the several important bug fixes to improve stability and performance.
C++ developers will see some IDE changes as some common templates have been relocated. Win32-based projects can now be found in the Windows Desktop category. The Windows Console and Desktop Application templates create their respective projects without invoking a wizard during creation. The Windows Desktop Wizard is available for those need it.
With 15.3 Preview, C# 7.1 language features are now supported. InfoQ’s own Jonathan Allen has provided a two part, in-depth look on these features. Part 1 covers Async Main and Default Expressions, while Part 2 covers Infer Tuple Names, and Pattern-matching with Generics. Thanks to 15.3 Preview, developers can now experiment with these features from within VS2017.
A helpful usability addition is the Infobar, which is used to inform when an installed extension may be misbehaving, allowing users to decide whether to disable the extension in question or leave it as-is.
Other additions to VS2017 15.3 include the helpful command line utility vswhere.exe. This tool is used to provide information on all installed instances of VS2017. While it originally debuted in 15.2, it has been modified in 15.3 such that it will no longer show Preview instances of VS2017 by default. To obtain any Preview builds in the search results, include the command line parameter -prerelease.
Among the many bug fixes corrected:
- Improved solution build times when Lightweight Solution Load is enabled
- Fixing Solution Explorer so that Track Active Item works correctly
- Various stability improvements and fixes
As always, preview releases of Visual Studio are not intended or licensed for use on production systems. Interested developers can download Visual Studio 2017 15.3 Preview now, and the full release notes are available for review.