With the release of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 15.8 version, for people who are using Redmond’s development tools – it is now considered a very useful upgrade.
Let’s see some of those major upgrades that have been applied via this release.
Language Upgrades
Firstly coming to the first part of the upgrade, which includes F# 4.5 and Typescript 3.0. After both being finalised in the month of July 2018, it is now seen that both have eventually shown up to the dev tools party. There have been improvements in F#, as well as in the general speed of Intellisense. It seems that the speed has almost doubled of what it was earlier. Even though a Real Programmer ™ would prefer to control the registry by hand, and not having to depend on Intellisense.
There also have been improvements in the C++ category too. This now allows the developers to skip the code that is non-user, mostly during debugging. Combined with that, Multi-caret editing also made a warm welcome here. This will allow multiple locations to be edited in a single file, simultaneously, with the use of mouse and keyboard. Sadly, for now, the addition is only restricted to the same file, rather than being over a particular project.
Microsoft also claims various performance improvements while running tests as well. A single test executed by over 10,000 MSTests, is done 82 per cent faster, than the earlier version.
Android Emulation Upgrades
This update has also added support for Google Android Emulation, particularly on the machines running the Windows 10 April 2018 update. What this means is that developers can run android emulator for Windows 10 much faster now. This is while running it with the Windows Hypervisor Platform, or Hyper-V, as we like to call it.
The performance of using Android Emulation in the past has been pretty slow. But, now with this update, even with an old Intel Core i7 and 16GB of RAM – the improvements are quite remarkable actually.
Using an app along with Xamarin in the emulator will prove to be less of a slowdown now, than what was seen earlier. Microsoft has also warned that the application might take some amount of abnormal time to be deployed as well. Therefore, this should be kept in mind, when trying to work with the new update, in Microsoft Visual Studio.
There were also some much-needed improvements to Xamarin as well. The update was linked to the designer part of Xamarin. There is now a split view editor, which now allows different layouts to be edited. These layouts can also be previewed at the same time as well. There is also placeholder images and data – which means that now developers don’t have to guess anymore regarding how a certain layout will work. It will all be shown as a preview.
The update is currently available now, and you can easily download it. The improvements and upgrades will definitely improve your overall workflow.