Visual Studio 2017 saw its third Release Candidate become available last week, overcoming a minor stumble as the first attempt had some difficulties with the installer. With those issue corrected, it is now worth reviewing what has been provided with this batch of changes. (The desired build is 26127, released on January 27.)
The key areas that RC3 focuses on are NET.Core and ASP.NET Core support, Team Explorer, and bug fixes related to the Visual Studio installer. Based on comments made by Microsoft's John Montgomery, VS2017 should be nearing production release as a couple of workloads have been removed from RC3 due to insufficient time to complete localization. While the Data Science and Python Development workloads will not be available at release, F# support will remain in VS2017 via the .NET Desktop and .NET Web development workloads. Montgomery says that both Data Science and Python Development workloads will be made available post-release as separate downloads.
NET.Core / ASP.NET Core
VS2017’s support for both of these workloads has moved out of a preview state. As part of this release .NET Core project migration from project.json/xproj files to csproj is more reliable.
Team Explorer
The Team Explorer module has been updated for better speed when used with Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server.
NuGet Updated
NuGet has been updated to support <PackageReference> in WPF, WindowsForms, and UWP projects. Lightweight Solution Restore now works without having to load a project.
General Enhancements
Several bugs have been fixed in RC3, including the addition of a retry button for the installer, offline install not totally functional, and shutdown delays among others. Since the number of major changes to VS2017 has slowed, it would seem that VS2017 is nearing formal release. Now is a good time to see what VS2017RTM will look like in your environment for your specific development needs.
VS2017RC3 is available for download now. For full details, visit the release notes.