Today we released Visual Studio “14” CTP, an early preview of the next version of Visual Studio. You can find the Visual Studio and .NET release announcements on Soma's blog. We’re pretty early on in development, but wanted to start to show some of the new features we’re thinking about and get feedback. To get started, downloadthe CTP (also available on MSDN subscriber downloads). Alternatively, save some time and use the provided VM in Azure.

This Visual Studio “14” CTP brings together several new technologies that we recently announced including:

  • The .NET Compiler Platform, also known as “Roslyn,” which includes the upcoming version of our managed compilers for C# and VB as well as an API that enables developers to integrate with the VS compiler and language service more easily than they can today. You can read more about the .NET Compiler Platform on the C# and VB team blogs.
  • Updates to the Visual C++ Standard Library, added utility functions, manipulators, functions, and several bug fixes that will improve productivity. To learn more about all the changes visit the C++ team blog.
  • Tooling for ASP.NET vNext. ASP.NET vNext is a lean and composable .NET stack for building modern web applications for both cloud and on premises servers. For more information about ASP.NET vNext go to ASP.NET vNext website and check out the ASP.NET team blog.

You can find a complete list of new features in the Visual Studio “14” CTP knowledge base article.

This preview is very early and is not meant for production environments. You should install the CTP on a test environment, such as a VM or clean machine. Please make sure that there are no earlier versions of Visual Studio on the machine to avoid known side by side issues. This KB article has a list of the known issues and installation requirements.

As always, please give us feedback. Report bugs using Connect and share your suggestions through Send-a-Smile from within the IDE or on our UserVoice site.

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John Montgomery, Director of Program Management, Visual Studio Platform

John has been at Microsoft for 15 years, working in developer technologies the whole time. Most recently before working on the Visual Studio core development environment, he was working on the tools for Windows 8 development