Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2015 is available for download

“With Visual Studio 2015 hand-in-hand with Windows 10, we’ve worked with the Windows team to deliver a set of tools to build Universal Windows apps and thereby broaden the reach of your applications”.

One major shift with this release is that while the Visual Studio IDE remains a Windows application, Microsoft is much more focused on enabling developers to build applications using multiple languages, operating systems, and platforms.

Microsoft has announced the release to manufacturing of the latest version of its flagship IDE, along with the release of.NET 4.6.

Last November, Microsoft announced plans to become all things to all developers by taking its.NET framework cross-platform to support Linux and Mac environments, and to deliver cross-platform capabilities in the Visual Studio toolset. Visual Studio 2015 and.NET 4.6 brings hundreds of new features for developers building for desktop, web, mobile, cloud and more.

Developers can download the new software now, but Microsoft has also outlined all the biggest improvements with more than 60 videos on the newest features. For code editing and refactoring, Roslyn-based tooling suggests potential fixes. “And with PerfTips, you even get performance information right in your code as you set breakpoints and step with the debugger”, Somasegar said.

Although Visual Studio 2015 is up for sale now, Team Foundation server 2015 – the online service for its development teams – has been put on hold and will be active in its candidate release mode until next month. While there will still be naysayers and cynical worrywarts, the firm is opening up to an “ecosystem of extensions” for Visual Studio that add support for new platforms, new workflows and new application types. A less expensive, non-subscription version of Visual Studio – VS Professional – will be provided to users for $499 while a free, community edition is also available. “Do that from Visual Studio”, said Somasegar. There are updated versions of VB.NET, C#, C++, TypeScript, F# and other languages and tools in VS 2015, as well. The software’s support for Python has also been upgraded. With this latest release, the company is targeting everything from cross platform development for iOS, Android and Windows to game development with Unity, Unreal and Cocos.

According to Soma Somasegar, the corporate VP of Microsoft’s developer division, the company has positioned Visual Studio 2015 and.NET 4.6 as “a great toolset for any developer, targeting any device on any platform”.

The IDE makes it easier to connect to cloud environments. Somasegar blogs to say that Microsoft today realizes that its developer audience is cross-platform programmers looking at desktop, web, mobile, cloud and more. Or, they can package their applications into Docker containers, so they can be run in any cloud service.

With Visual Studio 2015 now out and available for purchase, you can bet that Microsoft will begin marketing the new features to developers around the world.