Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6 & version 15.7 Preview 2 releases

by ddos · Published October 25, 2017 · Updated March 22, 2018

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6 has been released.

What’s news?

Performance

In 15.6, we continued improving solution load performance, specifically for scenarios when design time build results are cached. Large C# and Visual Basic solutions will load twice as fast as before when a solution has already been opened on a machine.

.NET Core Solution Load

We focused on .NET Core and according to our lab measurements, customers can expect 20% faster solution load times on average.

UI Responsiveness Notifications

In order to provide more transparency around extensions’ impact on performance and reliability, Visual Studio performs real-time analysis to determine whether an extension is likely to have caused unresponsiveness. If an extension is determined to have caused the hang, Visual Studio will display a notification which allows the user to disable the suspect extension or suppress future notifications for that extension

These are the customer-reported issues addressed in this release:

Resizing of windows is not reliable.

.NET Core Projects containing special characters fail to restore NuGet packages or build.

Test Explorer Default Architecture not remembered.

Solution Explorer does not remain pinned after closing Visual Studio.

Regular UI freezes during debug session.

File names revert to lower case when re-opening a project.

Mouse cursor sticks on the Pointer (Hand) icon.

VSIXAutoUpdate crashes on scheduled task.

Start-up generates “We’ve noticed that a tool window ‘Error List’ is slowing Visual Studio.” alert.

Quick Launch no longer displays results after toggling to full screen.

XAML Activity designer throws OutOfMemoryException due to failed assembly reference resolution.

Cannot Stop/Cancel Debugged Unit Tests when using Selenium WebDriver.

When using the /quiet switch, vsixinstaller.exe does not exit at the end of installation.