Visual Studio 15 Preview 4 Brings Many Interesting Features

The new Visual Studio 15 Preview 4 brings many interesting improvements. Among these you will find a better follow up feedback experience and installation improvements, alongside many other changes. Thanks to this new installation process, the smallest install takes up less than 500 MB on your disk, as compared to the 6 GB required for the previous version of the Visual Studio.

Moreover, this release also brings a revamped Start Page, which includes a series of new features, such as the Open and Create option, which you can now find in the Recent list and Newsfeed. Another new tool is the Roaming Extension Manager, which lets you keep track of your favorite extensions you use on all your development media. This creates a synchronized list stored in the cloud, allowing you to follow all the extensions you are using.

There are also other issues related to previous Visual Studio versions that are still present. For instance, build-to-build upgrades are not supported. As a workaround, the team suggests users should uninstall previous preview versions before installing Visual Studio 15 Preview 4. When using a proxy server when running Windows 7 together with the Service Pack 1, an error message appears saying that you can’t connect to the network. Sadly, a workaround for this issue will only be available on a future release, according to the information published on Microsoft’s website.

Also, in case the install size on your disk is reported inaccurately, you should simply run a disk cleanup in order to solve this issue. Some users have also reported they’re receiving the error message “Failed to load product definitions” when running the installer application for Visual Studio. As a workaround, the Visual Studio team says a simple Refresh will load them instantly.