The first CTP of the next major release of Visual Studio, VS "14", is now available for download. What's in store?

This CTP is a very early build intended to get feedback from the community. Its new features fall into four categories:

1.  "Roslyn" .NET compiler platform

This version of Visual Studio is built from the ground up on "Roslyn" with "Roslyn". It includes new and improved language and IDE features for C# such as a revamped refactoring experience, which includes two new core refactorings - Inline Temporary Variable and Introduce Explaining Variable.:

In response to popular demand from  C# devs it also has a conditional access (?.) operator:

See the C# blog for details of how to use this experimental feature.

Refactoring support for Visual Basic has been added for the first time. Another enhancement, Metadata-as-Source allows you, for example, to invoke the Go to Definition command on a symbol not defined in your source project.

2. ASP.NET vNext

The Visual Studio "14" CTP provides an early look at the tooling experience for the recently announced ASP.NET vNext.  As well as the ASP.NET 4.5 Web Application templates, new templates are included for targeting ASP.NET vNext:

3. Apache Cordova tooling

It also includes the tools for building HTML/JavaScript apps that will run on all of the Cordova supported phones that were recently released as Multi-Device Hybrid Apps for Visual Studio CTP1, see Cordova In Visual Studio

4.C++ 11 support

The Visual Studio "14" CTP includes support for user-defined literals, noexcept, alignof and alignas, and inheriting constructors from C++11, generalized lambda capture, auto function return type deduction, and generic lambdas from C++14, as well as many more new C++ features details of which can be found on the Visual C++ Team Blog

On his blog, Somesegar says that these improvements continue the push forward towards C++ and C++14 standards compliance and has this diagram to show how upcoming VS "14" CTPs fits into the ongoing VC++ Conformance Update:

 Improvements in CTP 1 are in lime green and those in lemon indicate "working on next" - click to enlarge

If you want to try Visual Studio "14" at this early stage, do heed Somasegar's advice to install it is a test envronment with no earlier versions of Visual Studio installed.You also need to be careful where you install it. As the download site puts it:

Installing a CTP release will place a computer in an unsupported state. For that reason, we recommend only installing CTP releases in a virtual machine, or on a computer that is available for reformatting.

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