Last month, Microsoft released its first preview of Visual Studio "15" (not to be confused with Visual Studio 2015 which, of course, launched last year). Today, it announced availability of its second preview, reminding developers that - given that this is still a preview - it"s only intended for testing purposes, and should not be used in a production environment.
Microsoft said today:
This preview like the previous one, lays groundwork for the next version of Visual Studio. We primarily focused on bug fixes and a few feature updates. New features include; making the account settings dialog more accessible to screen readers, diagnostics improvements to help track down focus related issues, Edit and Continue for XAML apps, and simplified debug configuration in Folder view. Preview 2 also includes the latest Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova Update 9 which supports Cordova 6.1.1.
John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio, also drew attention in his blog post today to one specific issue:
There is one breaking change I want to call out. The change is in how Visual Studio consumes templates and requires that you define templates in template manifest files. This change will not impact anyone in this release, but it is a heads up that templates not defined in template manifest files will stop working in the next Visual Studio “15” release. This change will only impact anyone who authors Visual Studio project templates. You can find out more about this breaking change on MSDN.
Microsoft has documented all known issues in Visual Studio "15" Preview 2 on MSDN, so if you"re planning to install it, be sure to familiarize yourself with those issues before doing so.
The company has also published an extensive list of its "most recent feature innovations and improvements" in the new preview, on VisualStudio.com.
You can download Visual Studio Enterprise "15" Preview 2 here.
Source: Visual Studio Blog (MSDN) via Mary Jo Foley