Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5 is now available and can be tested using an Azure VM!
The 5th Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio 2015 is available for download. This new CTP contains new features in debugging, diagnostics, the XAML language service, and ASP.NET 5 that we added after the November Preview release. The following links contain detailed lists of the new features and known issues.
Again, if you don’t want to take the risk of installing this preview on your production machine, there is a virtual machine image in Azure with Visual Studio 2015 CTP pre-installed.
The Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 Preview image is a great way to explore and evaluate all the new features of Visual Studio 2015 without needing to download the bits and install them on one of your machines. You can have a Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 Preview environment up and running in minutes. In addition to Visual Studio, we also added the latest Azure SDK 2.5 so you can test out the new SDK features that are only available on Visual Studio 2015, such as Enterprise SSO and Code Analysis for Azure. You can find more information in the Azure SDK 2.5 blog post.
When signing in to the Azure Portal, go to the “New” section in the lower left corner of the portal. Choose Compute and Virtual Machine. This will take you to the first step of the Create a Virtual Machine wizard where you can select “Visual Studio” from the list. You will see two images containing “Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 Preview”, select the one appropriate for your requirements.
Note that for every Visual Studio image we default to the recommended tier and VM size during configuration.
Once the machine has been created you can simply log in using the Connect button in the portal. This will open an RDP connection to the virtual machine. Once logged in, you can launch Visual Studio from the shortcut on the desktop. In order to use Visual Studio you need to sign in using your Microsoft account.
When you are done with development you can simply shut down the virtual machine by using the Shut Down button in the portal. By doing this you avoid being charged for compute time after you’ve finished using the VM. If you want to use the virtual machine again simply start it up again.
To try Azure today for free, sign up for the free one-month-trial. You will get CHF 190 to spend on all Azure services.
Are you a start-up or planning to found a business? The BizSpark program gives you free access to Microsoft Software for three years and free Azure usage for 5 users for a value of up to CHF 60’000.
Enjoy testing the new features in Visual Studio 2015 CTP!