Visual Studio "14" CTP Now Available

As announced today by Soma, we've just released the first CTP (Community Technology Preview) of the next version of Visual Studio. This is doubly-exciting as this is the first public release of a version of Visual Studio powered by "Roslyn" by default. At BUILD we released the "Roslyn" End User Preview which extends Visual Studio 2013 by replacing some components with their "Roslyn" equivalents but this version of Visual Studio is built from the ground up on "Roslyn" with "Roslyn".

The Visual Studio "14" CTP includes new and improved language and IDE features for C# such as a revamped refactoring experience (including new refactorings):

And the highly requested conditional access (?.) operator*:

*Because this is an experimental language feature, to enable it in a project you must add this element to your .csproj file to enable the "Experimental" language version:

 

These are just some of the small but powerful enhancements we're building for C# developers and we're far from done. But that's no reason for you to wait. Since we've literally rebuilt the very foundations of C# it couldn't be more critical for us to get your feedback early and often on what you like, don't like, love, and what you want to see more of.

Stay tuned for more posts from the Managed Languages team highlighting new and improved language features and experiences. In the meantime…

And one more thing: Visual Studio side-by-side support is not available on this early build. DO NOT install this CTP (or feed it after midnight) on a machine with any other version of Visual Studio installed.

 Regards,

Anthony D. Green, Program Manager, Visual Basic and C# Languages Team

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2014
    Awesome. Can't wait to try it. Any information on the "version" of C# 6.0 that is present in this CTP? The two biggest things I'm looking forward to still are the return of the C# REPL and lambda support while debugging. Are there any plans to use Roslyn to provide language support while editing T4 templates? It seems like it should be much lower-cost for the VS team to do that now with Roslyn.

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2014
    Agree with support of T4 - powerful feature I like and MUST HAVE support in VS. C# features also interesting to know, esp. "string expanding" (when you write "My name is $name" and got value of variable 'name'). And I hope anybody did anything to change that ugly and stupid "intellisense", since it's not "intelligent" at all! Just a dumb list of members.

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2014
    @MgSm88 It would probably be easy enough to provide an extension for T4 templates yourself now. I'm looking into how to make extensions, so maybe you'll see 3rd party support soon enough.

  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2014
    @MgSm88 I don't understand your question about the C# "version" in the CTP. It's what will eventually be C# 6 but we still have some features we're not 100% about under the "experimental" flag. No plans around T4. "Roslyn" might enable that experience and it's our goal to make the cost of doing such things must cheaper though we wouldn't be the team building it. The C# REPL is something we're still working on but we're working on how to give the best possible experience with it that is fully integrated with the power of Visual Studio. We're working on the lambdas thing. Regards, -ADG

  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2014
    @Anthony D. Green [MSFT] Hi can you help with my problem too ?

  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2014
    Guys, how did you make it work?? I installed VS2014, made a simple project with "null" feature: FileStream z = null; var s = z?.ToString(); But Studio complains "Error 2 Cannot implicitly convert type 'System.IO.FileStream' to 'bool'". And that even despite project settings "Language=C# 6.0"!

  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2014
    I am experiencing the same problem specified here stackoverflow.com/.../no-c-sharp-6-0-in-visual-studio-2014-ctp. Tried the conditional access example in this post on downloaded and installed VS '14' CTP and instance of VM available in Azure. I added <LangVersion>Experimental<LangVersion> to csproj file as well but with no luck... What am I doing wrong here...I believe I do not have to install Roslyn preview since VS '14' comes with Roslyn by default

  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2014
    @Peter, Thorn, chamindac, Try using "experimental" with a lower case 'e'. It looks like the setting is case-sensitive. We'd fixed it to be case-insensitive on the build I used when taking that screenshot but it didn't make it into the CTP branch it seems. I'll be updating this post shortly with a fixed screenshot. -ADG

  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2014
    @Anthony.... Awesome!!! It works like a charm. Thanks a lot..

  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2014
    Is an Azure deployment available? I don't own a computer that doesn't have VS 2013 on it...

  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2014
    @Jörgen Sigvardsson.. Yes it is available in Azure blogs.msdn.com/.../visual-studio-14-ctp-now-available-in-the-virtual-machine-azure-gallery.aspx

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2014
    @Anthony D. Green By "version" I just meant which feature set is in this release. Some features have been withdrawn since the Build CTP.

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2014
    Can you disable the "revamped" refactoring feature? I hate ReSharper because of things poping up every time you move the cursor but now VS looks like it's doing the same distracting behavior. It also says that "this" can be removed from method calls, yet StyleCop enforces it to be there (again, this was another reason ReSharper never lasted more than two days on my machine). If there's no option to disable that light bulb, will it at least be possible to say to never prompt again for a refactoring as an option in the drop down menu that appears? Sorry to be so negative but I can't use the CTP in its current state.

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2014
    Hi there. Just installed the VS 14 CTP but I cannot find the Roslyn templates. I was hoping to find something similar to what the End User Preview installs into VS 13. Can I install the End User preview into VS 14 CTP ? Thanks

  • Anonymous
    June 11, 2014
    On the start page, the link "Learn about new features in Professional 14 CTP" takes me to "What's New in Visual Studio 2013".

  • Anonymous
    June 12, 2014
    this refactoring is very old in java's ide

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2014
    I downloaded VS 2014 CTP, included "experimental", but no new features work - neither conditional access operator, nor base constructor. What should I do to enable them?

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2014
    The conditional access is cool! It saves a lot of work..

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2014
    Thank you for the conditional access but I think that ?. doesn't look so great even though it kinda make sense.

  • Anonymous
    July 25, 2014
    Is it possible to use the new Language Features in a ASP.NET vNext Web Project (.kproj)  ?

  • Anonymous
    September 13, 2014
    We need T4! Invested a lot in this technology and it's much easier then Roslyn. Why not keep Roslyn and T4 side by side?

  • Anonymous
    December 08, 2014
    Option Strict On Dim intDistance As Integer intDistance = 17.5

  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2015
    Its a good way to check null objects and convert it.