Microsoft have officially launched the latest version of  Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) together with an update to its .NET framework.
Visual Studio 2015 (VS 2015) is now available for download and purchase, but Team Foundation Server 2015  part of Microsoft’s online services for development teams  will remain in its release candidate phase until next month.
Today’s release of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 brings hundreds of new features for developers building for desktop, web, mobile, cloud and more.
Visual Studio 2015 includes many new debugging and diagnostic features, all of which have now been bundled into a single tool.
Along with Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 come the final versions of C# 6 and VB.NET 12. With dozens of new language features that simplify common coding patterns, the new versions of C# and VB.NET offer a big step forward for .NET developer productivity.
Visual Studio 2015 also includes significantly improved support for C++ 11/14/17 along with TypeScript 1.5, F# 4.0 and tools for Python and dozens of other languages.
Visual Studio 2015 also includes the latest Azure SDK providing one-click provisioning and deployment to Azure for web sites and cloud services, along with easy management of all or your cloud resources. Whether your application is using IaaS or Paas in Azure, built with .NET or Python or Node.js, or deploying to Windows or Linux or Docker containers, the cloud tools in Visual Studio 2015 let you easily integrate with Azure.
On top of this, developers can also use the preview of ASP.NET 5 in Visual Studio 2015. ASP.NET 5 is one of the most significant updates to the ASP.NET platform we’ve done. Because ASP.NET 5 runs on the CoreCLR, it can be deployed to your choice of platform, whether it’s Linux, Mac or Windows. On top of this, ASP.NET 5 offers foundational improvements in rapid development, cloud configuration, dependency management and composability.
Mobile development is increasingly about building mobile experiences that run across many mobile platforms. Visual Studio 2015 includes cross-platform mobile development tools for building applications targeting iOS, Android and Windows, and offers developers choice in what languages and technologies to use to developer their mobile applications.
For developers who prefer the richness of .NET, Visual Studio 2015 enables building Universal Windows Apps to target the breadth of Windows devices, from desktop to phone to IoT or even HoloLens. And by combining Visual Studio 2015 and Xamarin, developers can extend their .NET applications to also target iOS and Android. With Xamarin, everything you can do in Java or Objective-C is available from .NET and Visual Studio.
On top of these, Visual Studio 2015 also provides cross-platform C++ development for shared components targeting iOS, Android and Windows as well as integration with game engines like Unity to easily build cross platform games.
Visual Studio 2015 can be downloaded here!
