Microsoft releases Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5, improved diagnostics and debugging tools

Microsoft has just released its 5th consumer technical preview of Visual Studio 2015, introducing numerous new additions to its popular software development tools. Similar to the way the software giant is trialing Windows 10 in public with, the company is also looking to get feedback for the next major release of Visual Studio. Microsoft notes that this isn’t a “major release”, but it does include new features in the XAML language service, software diagnostics, debugging, and ASP.NET 5.

For the XAML service, the company managed to make it more reliable by rebuilding the service on top of the “Roslyn” .NET Compiler Platform. This results in a faster experience when editing XAML in Visual Studio.

A new timeline tool is added that allows developers to visualize their apps’ resource consumption in a scenario-centric view. That way developers know exactly when and figure out why a spike in resource consumption occurred so they can optimize it prior to release.

“The Timeline tool, which is in the Performance and Diagnostics hub, shows you how much time your application spends in preparing UI frames and in servicing networks and disk requests, and it does so in the context of scenarios such as Application Load and Page Load.” – Microsoft

Other improvements have been made to make it easier for developers to debug their software like the inclusion of new diagnostics tools. Microsoft has added a new Diagnostics Tools windows that would open once F5 is hit to begin debugging, this new window contains the following:

• Debugger Events (with IntelliTrace) gives you access to all Break, Output, and IntelliTrace events collected during your debugging session. The data is presented both as a timeline and as a tabular view. The two views are synchronized and can interact with each other.
• The Memory Usage tool allows you to monitor the memory usage of your app while you are debugging. You can also take and compare detailed snapshots of native and managed memory to analyze the cause of memory growth and memory leaks.
• The CPU Usage tool allows you to monitor the CPU usage of your application while you are debugging.
• (This tool replaces the CPU time PerfTip that was available in the Preview release of Visual Studio 2015.)

Last but not least are the experience and performance improvements make to editing with ASP.NET 5. References can now be added to standard C# projects, IntelliSense validation has been added to the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript editors, client-side task runner (e.g. Grunt and Gulp) support has been improved, browsers can now be selected while running or debugging ASP.NET 5 projects which was not possible in older versions of Visual Studio, custom commands can now be defined in a project.json file, which can now also be run and debugged directly within Visual Studio, and ASP.NET 5 templates have been updated to include project.json files that tap into the latest packages.

There’s more, so we advise you to check out the complete list of new features added in Visual Studio CTP 5 via the source link below.