Every time when Microsoft releases a new version of Visual Studio, there is a buzz around on what are the features that are released which makes developers life easier. Microsoft has recently announced a Technical preview of Visual Studio 2015 for the community to get their hands on before the final release. With this release we can find a much enhanced way the developer can work towards the newer IDE with everything right from the traditional web development to native windows development and to the latest Mobile development. For quite some time we are hearing support from Microsoft on developing Cross platform applications across multiple environment, with this release Microsoft has joined hands with Xamarin to provide the necessary support on the SDKs as well with the Visual Studio. with that said, lets quickly jump in and see the new features one by one.

While installing Visual Studio 2015 Technical preview, if you are a Cross Platform developer then you have something new. Once the primary required files are installed the installer will look for secondary installer supporting sdks for Android development, so it prompts if additional required installers to be downloaded and to be installed as shown in the screen below.Once you install the required files, you can see the Android templates available for development in Visual Studio 2015 Technical preview.

Android Emulator: This is quite interesting to me with Microsoft support towards open source and other platforms, we already have a good Emulator for Windows Phone and Windows Store application. With the support towards developing application on Cross platform its obvious we need to have an emulator for Android and yes as same like Windows phone emulator this Android emulator is also Hyper-V based.

Enhanced Code Editor: This feature is quite impressive, when ever you see a Yellow blub in the code editor it implies the unnecessary code that is not been referred or used. Basically its the suggestion that Visual Studio gives to the developer that some code is not necessary in this project and it takes some resources. Clicking on the yellow blub will list down the suggestions, with which you can analyse and get to the code that are not required.

Shared Projects: We have been sharing the project or the business code for quite sometime across project in Universal App development or using PCLs in the previous versions. Now with this new feature we can share the project as a reference to other projects in simple way and access the properties in the class in straight forward approach. To get the shared project, simply add a new project and select Share Project template from the list of templates available.

Ok lets see a quick demo, now add a shared project and create a class Student with some sample properties. Once added, click on Add Project and add a new console application and reference the shared project. In the Add reference section you can see a new portion called Shared Project which has the reference to the shared project as shown in the screen below.

Now you can simply refer the shared project and access the class properties easily without any hassle, with this reference its easy to access the properties and use it in any of the project. Access the properties is simply by referring the class name as shown in the code below.

Above are few of the features which immediately strikes me, still there are quite a lot of new features and enhancements which we will see in upcoming posts one by one. Until then have a good day!!