The latest preview of Visual Studio 15 has been released with a smaller and faster installation.

The improved installation comes from the fact that nearly all of VS is running on the new setup engine. This means that the smallest install is down to under 500 MB to be installed on disk, compared to 6GB in the previous release of Visual Studio. This version is missing some features that will increase the space taken, including .NET Core tooling and Azure tooling, but the rest of the existing VS 2015 feature set is available.

The installation options are still being worked on, and the developers say there will be further improvements before the final release, including support for automated deployments, offline installation and further refactoring and componentization.

Away from the installer, there are improvements to the features of Visual Studio, particularly to C++. The C++ compiler and standard library had already been updated in the previous beta with more support for C++11 and C++14 features, as well as preliminary support for certain features expected to be in the C++17 standard.

New in this preview is improved IntelliSense performance on projects and files not using precompiled headers in the C++ IDE. There's also error filtering and help for IntelliSense errors in the error list. If you click on the error column you can now apply a filter, and clicking on the specific errors or pressing F1 will launch an online search for the error message.

Windows desktop development with C++ has been improved in this preview with a more granular installation experience. You can now select which components you want so you only install the tools that you need.

Linux developers can make use of the Visual C++ for Linux Development extension that is now part of Visual Studio. According to the developers this provides everything you need to develop and debug C++ applications running on a Linux environment.

The new preview adds support for creating games using Cocos2d or the Unreal Engine, though Unreal development is not yet supported when using Visual Studio 15 Preview 4.

Finally, you can now create and debug mobile apps using Visual Studio that can target Android and iOS.

More Information

Visual Studio 15 Preview Release Notes

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