The next version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2017 is currently in Release Candidate. I’m pretty excited about this release, I took a preview look available here, as it works to undo a great deal of the bloat that has been creeping into Visual Studio over the years. While VS2017 isn’t quite ready for release, they have released an update for the Release Candidate (RC) build. In addition to several bug fixes, it adds a few new command line utilities and greatly streamline the csproj file format.
Details from the release announcement:
CLI enhancements
- Added the dotnet add p2p command, for adding project to project references.
- Added the dotnet remove p2p command, for removing project to project references from the project file.
- dotnet new templates are updated to reflect the simplified csproj syntax.
- Added verbosity control to build, pack, publish, restore & test using –v | –verbosity. The verbosity levels map to MSBuild verbosity levels.
Bug fixes
- Migration from xproj to csproj
- Migration of projects that have P2P references is no longer broken.
- Removed PostPublishScript target.
- Removed post-migration reference to dotnet-test-mstest.
- Fixed migration output issues.
- Migration adds RIDs when migrating projects with .NET Framework TFM.
- Migration no longer migrates the reference to dotnet-test-xunit if project.json contains it.
- Project to Project References
- Referencing from a UWP project is no longer blocked.
- Referencing from regular csproj no longer gives warnings.
- TargetFramework dropdown in the project properties page works.
- NuGet
- Restore hang fixes and stability improvements.
- Pack now uses the correct version range for dependency projects.
- Restore now adds correct project dependency version for command line restore.
- MSBuild
- Improvement to incremental builds for C# and VB projects that use wildcards that ensures a rebuild when a source file is deleted.
- ASP.NET Core Tooling
- Entity Framework Core commands such as Add-Migration and Update-Database can now be invoked using NuGet Package Manager Console.
- To successfully restore Bower packages, you no longer need to have Git installed globally or manually reference Git in Tools-Options.
- Can successfully debug ASP.NET Core Web Applications with Windows Authentication.
- Docker
- When provisioning an Azure Docker registry and App Service plan, it no longer requires a new resource group to be created in the same region as the App Service plan.
- Improved the usability of creating a new Azure resource group.