Visual Studio Update 2 has now been released, bringing a number of new features to the popular developer tool, including:
- New Universal Windows App tools
- Improved C++ 11/14/17 support
- Implemented ever C++ Standard Library vote into 11/14/17 standards
- iOS XCode project import wizard
- C# IDE usability improvements
- Extensions auto update support
- Many Version Control improvements
- NuGet improvements
- TypeScript 1.8
- New Analytics tools
- Updated Python and SQL tools
- much more
Oh, and the single most important thing Visual Studio needed… performance improvements! VS 2013 was started to get a bit slow, and VS 2015 was a downright dog at times, so hopefully these changes help!
Performance & Responsiveness
We’ve made the following Visual Studio performance improvements:
- Increased the speed of opening Team Explorer and browsing work item queries in Visual Studio.
- Significantly reduced log file generation into the %temp% directory to save disk space and prevent application failures.
- Improved the reliability of downloading and installing VS Update and additional features.
- Reduced the time for Visual Studio to start when extensions are installed.
- Stopped Setup failures when downloading certain packages and selecting certain features.
- Added support for SQLite in our browsing database engine for C++, thereby significantly speeding up the original parsing of the user code and of all IntelliSense operations that require lookup.
- Stopped the “yield” sign from appearing next to your sign in name in the upper-right corner of the IDE. Now, your settings and profile roam for 90 days after authenticating within the IDE. (Credentials no longer expire after 7 days of no connection to visualstudio.com.)
- Updated the ASP.NET MVC5 templates. This fix addresses the vulnerability described in Microsoft Security Advisory 3137909.
- Enabled a new database engine; now, C++ Project load should be faster and experience fewer UI delays.
- Increased the speed of extracting floating-point numbers with iostreams (in other words, “stream >> dbl”). It’s now up to 19x faster, and all bits of the extracted value are now correct.
- Increased the speed of std::vector reallocation and std::copy(); they are up to 9x faster as they call memmove() for trivially copyable types (including user-defined types).
- Increased the speed of std::vector, which is up to 11x faster.
- Increased the speed of std::string::replace(), which is enormously faster when replacing same-size substrings.
- Increased the speed of std::string::push_back(), which is up to 3x faster.
- Increased the speed of std::sub_match comparisons, as they now avoid constructing temporary std::strings.
- Increased the speed of std::function’s copy constructor; it is slightly faster with a reduced codegen size.
- Improved the performance in NuGet in the Update, Installed, and Consolidate tabs; the restore and update actions; and the query speed to repositories such as NuGet.org that support gzip compression.
- Improved the initial completion list invocation in a session, which now responds much faster as the enumeration of snippets has been changed to be an asynchronous operation.
- Enhanced T4 text templates so that they now support C# 6.0.
- Made reliability improvements in Code Map (as related to the Windows docking scenarios).
The full release notes are available here. You can download the update here.
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