A few days ago, Microsoft announced the release candidate (RC) of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. If you are a user of Visual Assist in this newest Microsoft IDE, any build of Visual Assist beginning with 2073 should work for you. I write “should” because builds of Visual Assist made before the RC, for obvious reasons, have not been tested against the RC. (We can’t test what we don’t have.)
Builds of Visual Assist usually install to a particular IDE if you have any flavor of it: beta, RC, or RTM. Only when we announce full support for a flavor are you assured we have successfully run our full suite of tests against it. And, only then should you expect complete compatibility between Visual Assist and your IDE.
As for timing, we don’t synchronize our builds and those of Microsoft. But because we issue six or seven builds of Visual Assist a year, one is destined to ship not long after every Microsoft release. That said, the next build we ship may or may not fully support the Microsoft release. Before tackling full support, we consider the readiness of our next build at the time of Microsoft announcement, the scope of delay to provide full support, the assumed quality of Microsoft’s release, and the estimated shelf-life of that release.
We give top priority to Microsoft RTM releases; the build of Visual Assist that follows an RTM almost always fully supports it. Other Microsoft releases are usually rolled into our normal development cycle, and they are also the releases that require the most development time.
We are already aware of two conflicts between the release candidate of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 and Visual Assist build 2089, our latest. We expect to address these in our next build:
- line breaks are doubled during in-line expansion of VA Snippets. The behavior is likely due to a bug in Update 2. For now, don’t use your affected VA Snippets or edit expanded code.
- a new feature for C# users in Update 2 inserts * at the start of new lines when writing /**/ comments. That feature conflicts with the more powerful “Auto-extend Multi-line Comments” feature in Visual Assist. For now, disable one or the other.
If you subscribe to any of our social channels, you will learn about our builds and the IDE flavors they support. If you are ahead of us, meaning you use Visual Assist in a flavor of an IDE that Visual Assist does not yet fully support, we ask that you report incompatibilities between Visual Assist and your IDE. Your reports help us attain full support.
