Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 Available for Download | Hacker News Reader

Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 Available for Download

blogs.msdn.com

263 pointsrunesoerensen120 comments

Note that the "comparison" page offers near-zero guidance on whether you're allowed to use the Community edition, to the point that it's really not a comparison at all: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs-2015-product-editions

The community edition is free for individual developers, developers creating open source projects under an approved OSI license, or for up to 5 developers in an entire organization. Basically, it's not for production use by companies with more than 5 developers developing proprietary software. At least from my quick reading of the license: https://www.visualstudio.com/support/legal/mt171547

UPDATE: Community also excludes any organization with 250+ PCs or $1,000,000 or more in yearly revenue. (credit: icegreentea)

That's a pretty good summary. The only extra catch is that enterprise organizations cannot use the community edition except for open source / educational purposes. The kicker is that they define enterprise as 250+ PCs -OR- $1 million plus annual revenue.

That definitely borks a lot of smallish companies working in certain fields.

Thanks for the additional note, I updated my post. I wish Microsoft would just post a real, actual comparison instead of just linking to summary pages and forcing you to read licenses. That's just about as user-unfriendly as it gets.

to be honest, if you have 250 PCs or $1mm revenue, you can spend $45/month per developer on the software tools necessary for them to do their jobs without getting 'borked'.

They offer a detailed comparison matrix here... https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/compare-visual-s...

Which also omits any ability to compare features to what the Express edition offers.

True - I believe express is the same as in 2013 - you cant use extensions and it targets specific platforms (desktop, web).

Uh, so if I'm interpreting everything correctly indie developers for Windows/Phone 8/10 can use community edition. The only feature really missing is TFS/Code Lens). That's pretty great! no need for me to keep paying for Professional.

(The Windows 10 stuff won't be available until July 29)

Intellitrace is also missing. I've heard great things about it, but have never used it due to the cost

Ah, Intellitrace is pretty neat but I must confess I very seldom use it. For some scenarios it might be crucial but for most app development I think you can manage without it

That comparison URL goes to a 'page not found' error for me, which is frankly astounding.

There are more details about the .NET 4.6 release on the .NET blog [1]

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/07/20/announcing...

Glad to that developement on WPF has not stagnated.

Surprisingly, there was even a winforms update recently.

It's well worth trying .NET 4.6 out if you'd benefit from a performance improvement. I noticed dramatic free performance improvements in Disruptor.NET with the .NET 4.6 CTP.

For me, .NET Core and ASP.NET 5 are the most exciting things going on in this space at the moment. On Linux, it's all still too buggy to be usable in beta5 (the version shipping with VS2015), but the vibe I'm getting from the weekly standups is they are going to start prioritizing this very soon and it's going to be very usable on a 3-month time frame.

Definitely.

Keep an eye on the published roadmap on their wiki: https://github.com/aspnet/Home/wiki/Roadmap

Beta 7's focus on cross platform should be good!

I love how the VS2013 update 5 is 6.1GB where you can download the full version of Ultimate with update 5 and it's only 4.8GB.

1990s me would be blown away that VS could be this big. I'd be even more impressed that my work fiber downloaded it at 10.2MB/sec (yes MB not Mb).

1900s me had a fabric binder full of MSDN CDs - dozens upon dozens it seemed - with the same software footprint and a harder "download" process.

I have those from as late as 2006.

Hoarder me keeps everything :-)

Here's the direct download link for the English Enterprise edition which I'm downloading using wget: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/4/7/647EC5B1-68BE-4...

How did you find this url? I would like to get the community edition ISO url, but can only find the RC dated 4/27/2015, when searching download.microsoft.com.

Got it from VisualStudio.com, there is an option at the bottom in the Downloads page to get the ISO which is the same as the one in MSDN (same SHA1 values listed) but has different file names.

Here's English Community: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/B/C/0BC321A4-013F-4...

Doh! missed that, thank you!

Visual Studio 2015 Community: Full-featured Integrated Development Environment for building Web, Windows Desktop and cross-platform iOS, Android, and Windows apps [1].

... cross-platform iOS, Android, and Windows apps? That's new, isn't it?

[1] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/vs-2015-product-...

EDIT: Err, sorry, the page changed since I wrote this comment, the quoted statement is gone...

EDIT2: Looks like the page is flipping between two versions as I hit the reload button, probably a mirroring problem. I apologize the noise.

Yes it is. Although, is .Net fully open sourced yet? or still in the process? I'm not so sure you can build an IOS app quite yet in visual studio?

With xamarin you can.

Has been open sourced but needs work to be compatible with other platforms.

Parts of it. Stuff like WinForms and System.Web are so wrapped around the axle of Windows that they probably won't be open-sourced, but a lot of it has been.

Winforms is fairly windows centric, but iirc there is a Mono compatability for most of the interfaces... as to System.Web, I'm pretty sure this has been open since ASP.Net v3, which iirc is included with Mono.

I haven't tracked Mono & .Net as closely for the past few years as I've been doing far more node dev, and/or migrating away from .Net apps.

That was announced earlier.

I believe that's referring to Xamarin and Cordova, which are now built into VS2015. Xamarin still requires a Xamarin subscription to compile and deploy the apps, though.

On the other hand, they might also be talking about the new Universal Windows Platform bridges [1], which let you port your Android, iOS, Win32 and Web apps to native Windows apps.

[1]: https://dev.windows.com/en-us/uwp-bridges

I am so scarred from trying to develop an ASP.NET vNext website using the VS 2015 preview releases. The project templates never synced with the tagged code in github, and there were endless bugs. Is it stable now? By that I mean, can I reliably override one of the ASP.NET vNext libraries from source?

Has anyone done anything interesting with Roslyn to date (v1 is mentioned in the notes)?

I think LINQPad now uses Roslyn.

I would be great if this would trigger a flurry of VBA-style IDE to use VB/C#/F# in Excel or any major non Microsoft software!

http://source.roslyn.io is pretty cool and the Omnisharp IDE uses Roslyn

Fog Creek used it to replace their custom compiler.

http://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-part-2/

I was working on a large enterprise application that had a dynamically generated data model, so all data access was done through strings. So much of the code looked like dictionary accesses

"if(car[Constants.Wheels"].ContainsKey[Constants.FrontLeftWheel])"

Now unfortunately there was not just one constants file, this application numbered nearly 60 projects and each one possessed a constants file and people added strings when they needed to access a new item from the data model.

public class Constants { string FrontLeftWheel = "FrontLeftWheel; }

I was given the painful task of replacing every single constant and string in the code with new constants generated from the data model. This probably involved making something along the lines of 40,000 replacements. Luckily I remembered a post by Eric Lippert on Roslyn. Roslyn helped me replace all of the old constants with constants generated from the new data model based on a few heuristics to order by best matches but Roslyn saved me months of mind numbing work so I'ma HUGE fan.

Interesting... Was suspecting (hoping) that the technology would provide solutions outside ide/code space.

Could you provide some highlevel details of the implementation? TIA!

Do you think you could write a blog post about this? Finding interesting uses for Roslyn may help drive its use in the community. Plus, that just sounds interesting.

In response to the two replies.

Sure I'll write up a blog post this weekend with the high level details and link to it here when I'm finished.

Im working on building a live coding environment for VS with Roslyn: http://comealive.io.

Nice! That looks great.

It's not using v1 yet, but check out omnisharp https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn

It's perhaps also worth looking at Microsoft's CodeFormatter: https://github.com/dotnet/codeformatter

It rewrites code to match their coding style.

We used the xunitconverter (which is part of the codeformatter repo) recently to convert a whole bunch of old MS Test based unit tests to xUnit. https://github.com/dotnet/codeformatter/tree/master/src/XUni...

The provided link is for those with an MSDN subscription. I'm waiting for the Community Edition to appear.

It will be available at [1] around 16:30 GMT

[1] https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studi...

Appears to be available here: https://www.dreamspark.com/Product/Product.aspx?productid=10...

Didn't DreamSpark used to have the Pro edition? Now for both 2013 and 2015 it's the community edition

No idea about Pro, but I downloaded 2013 Ultimate from Dreamspark.

Yes. In fact I downloaded the pro version about two weeks ago, so it seems they only removed it relatively recently. I hope they add pro 2015.

The Community edition is basically Pro, with different licensing. From what I understand, that's the version that would make the most sense for the target audience of DreamSpark (college students) anyway.

I would have thought that community would replace express, but there still seems to be an express edition.

You can use Express at work (5+ devs) but not Community.

You can use Community at work as long as you are a small enterprise (less than 5 dev) and you make less than some (huge) amount per year.

> You can use Community at work as long as you are a small enterprise (less than 5 dev) and you make less than some (huge) amount per year.

$1 million annual revenue isn't exactly a huge amount.

Pretty sure if you make more than 1mil per year you can afford to buy VS. The community edition is intended for indies, hobbyists and small enterprises.

> Pretty sure if you make more than 1mil per year you can afford to buy VS. The community edition is intended for indies, hobbyists and small enterprises.

$1 million in revenue is a very small enterprise.

$1200 for VS professional is one tenth of one percent of a million dollars, plus you get a msdn subscription, and if you're paying a programmer more than $62400 (gross) it's less than a week's salary.

I think you confuse revenues and profit.

I don't think I am? There's a million bucks a year going in, and then some big chunk going out, and what's left over is profit. What I pointed out is of that million dollars coming in the door, the amount extra that would have to go out is not that much in absolute terms, and not that much as compared to a programmer.

Agreed... if you have 5 software developers, and other overhead, you'll hit that while barely at a break even point. That said, the relative costs if you have that many employees is pretty small.

I don't think the break point is particularly unfair... there are lots of students, and small/indie developers that can use the Community Edition, where before you had to cobble along with the Express versions. I now use Community at home, which is just easier to deal with.

> I don't think the break point is particularly unfair...

I wasn't saying it was unfair, just that characterizing $1 million in revenue as "huge" was, well, pretty ludicrous.

I'm installing it now from https://www.visualstudio.com.

Do any versions do away with having to login? Spent a weekend on Moreton Island last year and was unable to login, hence unable to do any work. The Partner Edition sucks for this reason.

Visual Studio encourages you to sign in with your Microsoft account, but you can license it with a product key instead.

Help -> Register Product -> License with a product key

Is that valid for vs2015. Everything I've read from them says they're dropping away with product keys for it.

One subtly awesome thing here is that with ryujit being a part of 4.6 then you can do simd in .net without any hacky pre requisites and workarounds.

(http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/04/07/the-jit-fi...)

VS 2015 is version 14.0. VS 2013 is version 12.0. What happened to version 13.0 ?

Triskaidekaphobia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskaidekaphobia). The same thing happened to Microsoft Office - Office 2007 was version 12 internally, yet Office 2010 jumped to version 14. On the plus side, it means that the upcoming release (Office 2016) has an internal version number that matches the year.

I guess the question is whether the people at Microsoft who decide these things are themselves superstitious or whether they think their customers are superstitious (to the point that they would avoid a product with an unlucky internal version number).

I'm really loving how the refactor and generate stuff has developed over the years. It is such a different experience these days and I'm probably at least five times as productive as a result of it.

First we had no refactor tools at all, and how we survived I'll never now

Then basic refactor tools where introduced. You could call up a dialog to do explicit refactoring.

Then the generate functionality was introduced and you could start doing things like typing out a class name that didn't exist, right-click and generate a class and file with that name.

Now everything been taken to the far end. I can just edit parameters, types etc directly in the editor, a light bulb will appear, I click it and choose how it will apply refactoring regarding my changes. If I want to change the type returned from a method inherited from a base class I can just edit it in the derived class and have it apply it on the base class.

Same with generate, just type a lot stuff like you want it to be, a light bulb will appear and it generates everything with correct parameters and all.

If I want to break stuff out of a blob class to a another class called by the original class, I just highlight the methods in the editor and chose "create new class" and it will add initialization for the new class, a field or property for it.

Sometimes when I need to split a class in two there really isn't any good refactoring tool. So what do you do? Copy the class and rename it so you have them side by side in the same file. Eliminate the fields and properties for each that you don't want in either. It will now highlight all the code you've broken. Now delete and change all that has been highlighted. Then just click the light bulb and choose "move class to file named whatever.class". Voila! It's such a streamlined process.

Or just things like Ctrl-clicking something to navigate to it (or pressing F12). Or quickly finding what code calls a method. Or snippet templates like ctor or prop.

To put the cherry on the cake I can press Ctrl-M+Space and Ctrl-M+Z to have the Code Maid plugin reorganize the code and normalize white space.

Seeing, doing and navigating has all come together so nicely and totally changed the way I code. It has made constant and continuous refactoring feasible and effortless. The only downside is that I'm not always sure where Visual Studio ends and Resharper begins :)

The thing I miss though is unit testing being as "on-the-fly" and integrated into the editor. I'd love to be able to write mini-tests as annotations to methods and have VS highlight when it breaks them.

... and maybe continuous background compiling and "live-updating" of apps :)

Background compiling and live-updating is now here with Rosyln powered builds.

EDIT: actually I'm not sure if this only applies to ASP.NET 5 which constantly builds in the background in-memory...

Hmm, in what sense, or do you mean it's feasible now? I was thinking that whenever I press F5 it should instantly run. It's insane that the computer just loiters around and doesn't compile until you explicitly tells it to, when it could do incremental background compiling... especially since the editor pretty much does that anyway to provide its intellisense and stuff. The build process seems very separated from the editor. Guess it's more complicated with app that's deployed to devices though.

Live-editing I was thinking more like I could change parameters and methods and have the reflect directly in an running app. Edit-and-continue has been around for a while but doesn't work on apps ... for probably natural reasons. Eclipse seems to have stuff like that

Roslyn is a new compiler built in C# and faster. When using VS2015 (and confirmed working with asp.net 5 projects), the solution is compiled using Roslyn and completely in memory (meaning it doesnt build and then write out assemblies to disk just to read them back into memory and reset the app).

The whole cycle is way faster and there's a lot less pause time between editing a c# file, hitting save and then just hitting refresh in the browser. I'm not sure about mobile app dev but that probably has more latency due to the emulator setup.

hmm, I doubt it applies to Windows Forms and WPF... but I could be wrong

"continuous background compiling and "live-updating" ... I use .net demon for this. It also does auto-save.

Well, Resharper is available since VS2003 if not earlier. It has what VS2015 has to offer and more. Including extracting code into methods and classes. I can't even image the pain developing without it (at least before VS 2015).

Yeah, I've been a heavy Resharper user for a long time as well... but now I almost don't know which bulbs and stuff is VS and what is Resharper :) and Resharper re-binds some shortcuts. Feels like Resharper is a couple of steps in front of VS still though, the refactor LINQ expression functionality for instance is simply fantastic

I know a lot of guys that love Resharper.. me, I always found it annoying and in my way.

Does anyone know if the RTM version will be able to upgrade to the full version once it is released? Also, will it be able to install updates later on?

RTM = Release to Manufacturing = full version.

How about my release candidate that I installed about a month back? Will it update automatically? Does it even need to? Did anything change?

Will it update automatically?

Not as far as I know.

Does it even need to?

Prereleases expire. You'll probably need to upgrade.

Did anything change?

A fair bit, yeah. Not sure if you'll notice, but things will be different and a lot of stuff may not work correctly.

It's funny, but I started a user profile signing into a VS2013 version.. I had to reset my environment in order to get around some really buggy behavior in VS2015-RC ... that said, I do like most of the recent changes.

If you're building Windows 10 Universal apps you should hold off until Windows 10 is released on the 29th. I just ran the VS2015 Community installer and it prompted me to remove the Windows 10 Universal Apps Tools RC.

Ah. I'll wait until I upgrade this computer to Windows 10. I will follow up with a clean install of Windows 10 if the nVidia drivers don't act up. Thank you!

Doesn't seem to have licenses available for BizSpark accounts yet?

EDIT: If I check my email, I get an answer

    All BizSpark members who have an active Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN
    subscription will see that their subscription has been automatically converted to
    Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 with MSDN when Visual Studio 2015 is released.

The news says nothing about 64-bit Support. That's definitely the first Visual Studio that has a 64-bit Version.

Because VS still is 32-bit[1] program.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/n3fyEos.png

Any idea for the availibility of the Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2015?

The 2013 ones work if you go hack the VSIX. It's just a version change in the manifest.

as a newish dev (eventually I'll work my way to vim), I really enjoy using Visual Studio, and my wallet is very happy that they decided to release a Community edition.

Microsoft has been making some great strides lately - keep it up!

If my understanding is correct you're using VS and writing C#. If that's the case it's just stupid to use VIM.

Let me tell you one thing: Using VIM will not make you "pro hacker". It won't even make you more productive, probably.

If my understanding is correct you're using VS and writing C#. If that's the case it's just stupid to use VIM.

Please don't call people stupid just because you don't like their workflow. BTW, you can use a Vim emulation layer in VS.

In fairness to GP, GGP isn't using vim, he just seems to have picked up on or imagined a meme that "Real Programmers use vi or emacs".

Which, yes, is a bit daft.

There's a VS extension for Vim anyway: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3...

Have a look at VSVim it is a Vim emulation layer for VS if you are really into Vim.

I don't see upgrade pricing mentioned anywhere - If one already has Visual Studio 2013 Pro with MSDN (active), is it necessary to repurchase to get 2015?

If you have an active msdn, you should see 2015 now in subscriber downloads along with any product keys.

You should be able to get VS2015 Professional as part of your subscripton

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/31/visual_studio_2015_m...

I hope they plan to bring Visual Studio on Mac OS X

Have you seen Visual Studio Code [1]? It's not full VS, but it's a good start.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/

I've tried it but it's not the same feeling. However, VS Code is perfect for quick file edit.

Too bad this does only contain the preview of .NET 5. I hoped this release would bring a more stable version of .NET 5

It contains .NET 4.6, which is stable and not .NET 5. AFAIK, .NET 5 doesn't exist?

highmastdon is referring to this release containing only a preview of ASP.NET 5. Note the ASP.

asp.net 5 beta 5: https://github.com/aspnet/Home/releases/tag/v1.0.0-beta5

I think you mean ASP.NET 5

The ASP.NET team had stated a few months back they are a couple months behind the visual studio release, so it shouldn't be that much longer.

The ASP.NET team recently published a roadmap here: https://github.com/aspnet/Home/wiki/Roadmap

There will be three more beta releases scheduled for July, August and September, followed by a release candidate in November. RC 1 will have a go-live license and support for production deployment on x86/x64 Windows, Mac and Linux.

There may be more than one RC release, depending on feedback, but the final release should be some time in Q1 2016.

+1 on everything. Little disappointed @Test coverage as it is not available in Community!

Installing the enterprise version now. Hopefully it works fine side by side with 2013.

I had 2015 RC working side by side with 2013 with no problems. Full release should work properly as well.

What's the eq. for my MSDN Ultimate? Enterprise?

Warning to anyone using Windows 2012 Server R2 as your workstation - if you install Microsoft Emulator for Android, it enables Hyper-V which will cause your video drivers to no longer work since Hyper-V replaces your video card with a virtual one (or something like that).

Announcement page - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2015/07/20/visual-...

Thanks, we updated the link from the MSDN subscriber's page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com