Today, Microsoft released the 2nd CTP for Visual Studio “14”. According to Brian Harry, there will be “tons” of CTPs between now and the final release (expected sometime next year).
Without going into a lot of detail here’s a short list of what’s new in this CTP (from the Visual Studio Blog):
- Save and Apply Custom IDE Layouts. You can now save and apply custom layouts for tool windows in the IDE. The Save Window Layout and Apply Window Layout commands are under the Window Menu and you can also rename, reorder, and delete layouts from Manage Window Layouts.
- Light Bulb Editor Adornment. Light Bulbs are an extensible editor adornment to identify and help you fix issues in your code. To use them, place the caret on a line with an issue or hover over an issue and you’ll see a light bulb that lists actions you can take to resolve the problem and even a preview of proposed solutions.
- Editor Touch Support. The Visual Studio Editor now supports touch gestures for scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, tap-and-hold for context menus, double-tap for word selection, and line selection by tapping in the margin.
- VC++ Property Pages and Editor Enhancements. We updated the Configuration and Platform dropdown values for VC++ Property Page dialog to remember the last user selection when the dialog is closed. We also added Move Function Definition (move the body of a function definition to source or header/in-class definition) and Implement Pure Virtuals (quickly create definitions for a class that inherits constructs ([abstract] class, struct, etc.) containing pure virtuals). We also updated Create Declaration/Definition to include Code Peek and improved Find in Files to enable subsequent results to be appended to previous results (“append mode”). Checkout the VC Blog for details on these enhancements.
- ALL CAPS. Last week with the RC for Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 we added an option to sentence case menus; in this VS “14” CTP we changed Menu Bar styling to Title Case for everyone to help us get feedback on the change. We’ll use the feedback we get to help determine if we keep it as it is in this preview, make it an option under the Tools/Options menu, or take some other path.
You can view the full details of the CTP here and you can download the bits here.
NOTE: It is recommended that you do not install this CTP along side any other version of Visual Studio. If you don’t have a spare development/test machine lying around or you don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up a new virtual machine, you can always run the new Visual Studio “14” CTP 2 on Azure.
If you run across any bugs in the CTP and/or have any suggestions, please submit them on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Connect site.