Software Update: Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 15.5.1

Microsoft has released version 15.5.1 of Visual Studio 2017. This popular programming development environment has useful options to make programming easier in Visual C++, Visual Basic, C#, F#, Python, and R, among others. You can read the entire laundry list of changes from the 2017 edition in the accompanying release notes. Below are the changes since the previous entry in our download section:

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5.1 – Top Issues Fixed in this Release

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

• Wrong xamarin.forms version referenced in template.
• Switching branches in Git breaks IntelliSense.
• Errors reported when none exist (Visual Basic projects).
• Xamarin now supports Xcode 9.2: This fixes the customer reported issues with storyboards and remote simulator.

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5 – Summary: What’s New in this Release

• We added reliability and cancelability to the Visual Studio IDE installer.
• We’ve updated the error dialog to display more information to help solve installation problems.
• We reduced load times of large C# and Visual Basic projects.
• You can now work with Git submodules and worktrees, and configure fetch.prune and pull.rebase in Team Explorer.
• Find information on the .NET Core and ASP.NET Core security advisories.
• The MSVC compiler toolset has been updated to version 14.12.
• C# compiler now supports the 7.2 set of language features.
• We added .NET Core SDK project support to F# tooling and changed the way you acquire F#.
• We added Visual C++ Improvements to the Standard Template library.
• We improved the Razor syntax formatting in the Visual Studio Web Tools.
• Docker containers now support multi-stage Dockerfiles.
• You now have Angular 2 Support for inline and .ngml template files.
• You can now open projects exported from the ARM online compiler in Visual Studio.
• Open folder now supports remote tasks for using any remote build system or running arbitrary commands.
• We added Embedded Source support while debugging, and Edit and Continue support for Embedded PDBs.
• The WCF Web Service Reference for .Net Core is now part of Visual Studio 15.5.
• You can debug in-production apps with the Snapshot Debugger.
• IntelliTrace’s Step-back debugging feature is now supported.
• You can access Azure resources from Visual Studio with Conditional Access enabled.
• Office Web Add-in projects and VSTO Projects now support development with Office in the Windows Store.
• Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin contains updated support for the Xamarin SDKs for iOS and Android.
• Unity projects are now automatically reloaded in Visual Studio when you add or remove a Unity script.
• Test Explorer now supports Google test framework by default.
• You can now preview XAML live as you type in the Android emulator.
• The Windows Packaging Project now allows you to include UWP components like: BackgroundTasks, AppServiceConnection, or FullTrustProcessLauncher.
• You can now configure continuous delivery from the project publish workflow to automatically deploy your project to Azure on every code change to your repo.