Recently, the US tech giant Microsoft on Mar 8, 2017 launched a new version of Visual Studio 2017 with new potentials for developers to craft any full-fledged application for any platform.

The Visual Studio 2017 offers a great experience for mobile and cloud development, enhances Device Operation tools to allow greater levels of merging and productivity for developers.

Here are the updated features that Microsoft has added:

A New installer in vs2017        

Visual Studio 2017 released with a new, renovated installer. The previous versions took hours to install, which could be a painful experience for many. Now, this pain can be less and you would love the 2017 version for this. Also, it has more new features, like it installs faster with less system engagement, no garbage files are left after un-installation, reduces the imprints of Visual Studio, to select and install only the features you need, is made easier for you.

Its Start Page has a new Create and Open facilities like, Most Recent Used items on start page shows repos so that you can easily clone them on your present machine that you have cloned previously on another machines, A More Refined visual design for utilization of white space and to give feedback about elements on small screens, It Page have a list of recently used templates and searchable templates to create new projects directly. Also, the ‘ Get started section can be now dismissed.  

New Extensible Features

The new release installer provides you full control over the installed tools. Users will get warning on an attempt to install any extension.

Live Unit Testing

The Live Unit Testing performs unit tests and shows results and code covered on the editor. It supports 3 testing frameworks, MS Test, NUnit, xUnit and works with C# and VB projects. But, this is only available in the Enterprise edition.

Debugging- Run to Click                                                                                   

Now, you need not to perform as many steps to execute the coding and to stop. You can normally click the icon present close to the code line.

The New Exception Helper: you can take help from the new exception helper to view compact information about exceptions, the inner exceptions are instantaneously accessed in a non-modal dialog. You can instantly see inside this for which value is null checking for Null Reference Exception. You can also now break the exception types that are thrown by any particular module.  

Language Extensions:

There are some proposed extensions for languages visual basic and C#.

In C#

•  Task-like return types for async methods is included.
•   Pattern matching extensions.
•   Nested local functions that support declaration of functions in a block

scope.

•    Ref returns that enable functions to return values by reference.
•    Value tuples that introduce language support for using tuples to

temporarily group a set of typed values.

Improvements in Visual Studio 2017

Some of the improvements are:

• The GitHub extension is included and can be selected in the new version.
•  To reduce solution load time and startup time, the version has been optimized.
•   Reload All Projects get changed with Reload Solution to provide better execution of switching branches external to Visual Studio.
•   It can now oversee extensions capability that has an effect on solution load, editing, or startup.
•  The dialog box for account settings is now clearer to screen readers.
•   Replacing VSHub, a new external service host got introduced.
•    After cloning, you are now loaded to the folder view of your repository, automatically.
•    The communication is clearer for the Pre-release license expiration messages.
•   The local repositories to an SCC are published easily on the version control status bar and to keep the tack for un-pushed and uncommitted work.

Conclusion

Visual Studio comes up with lots of features on its every release and is now grown to a much bigger level. I wonder what could be next after this.

You can download the new version of Visual studio 2017, the community, Professionals and enterprise editions. While community edition is free, the others having some features differences are paid.

Here is the link to download the Visual Studio 2017 https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/