#VisualStudio 2015 Update 1 CTP now available

After the final release of Visual Studio 2015 in the month of July 2015, Microsoft has released the Update 1 CTP version of the all new Visual Studio 2015 IDE. This update has few new features for the developers, bug fixes and known issues. It’s a preview release and hence cannot guaranteed as bug free.

In case you want to try out the latest bits, find the download link in this post. Don’t forget to check out the release notes before downloading it.

What’s new in Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 (CTP)?

The download link is available at the end of the post. Before starting the download, you should aware of the new features, fixes and known issues in this build. Here is a list of new features and bug fixes in Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 CTP, you should also go thru the known issues once before installing it:

• In this release, Microsoft added Edit and Continue support for /BigObj in C++, which means that you can now Edit and Continue while debugging Windows Store C++ projects.
• In this release, the C# Interactive Window is back in Visual Studio, as well as the command-line C# REPL window.
• Scripting APIs for C# and Visual Basic now available on GitHub. These APIs enable you to load and run C# and Visual Basic code as scripts in both the interactive window and REPL tool.
• Team Explorer now features a new Pull Requests hub where users can see the list of pull requests that they have created, as well as the pull requests that others have assigned to them.
• Create Pull Request experience has been improved. Now, users can publish branches and create pull requests in a single action.
• We now have a branch policy that requires associated work items for any pull request. Like the code reviewer and build policies, any code submitted to the branch must be submitted via pull request. When a pull request is created, the associated commits will be inspected for work item links, and if there is at least one link, the policy will be fulfilled.
• Also, you can now link work items to pull requests directly and if the pull request is directly linked to at least one work item, the policy will be fulfilled. If no work items are linked to the pull request or the associated commits, the policy will fail.
• Bug fixes of the Diagnostic Tools window which was showing the message "The Diagnostic Tools failed unexpectedly" with "A cluster resource failed" or "Unable to Start Standard Collector" in the Diagnostics Hub output in the Output window.
• Fix for UI delay in Visual Studio when the Diagnostic Tools window is open.
• Fix for the publish fails bug having the error message "date is not within permissible limits" when you use TFS in Turkish.
• Fix for Distributed Test Automation and Cloud Load Testing tasks fail when project collection or project name has a space.
• Fix for the Windows 8.1 acquisition breadcrumb template, which was not displaying after you install Visual Studio 2015.
• Fix in ClickOnce Publishing optional feature to obtain required Windows 8.1 SDK tools.

This is a community technology preview (CTP) release and hence it has some known issues which will get fixed in the later version of the update. For a list of known issues and workarounds, check out the Microsoft’s official site KB3025135. If you find out more issues other than those mentioned in the site, report them to Microsoft Visual Studio team via the connect site.