The first preview of VS2017 15.8 featured the support for ARM64 builds, Docker support for ASP.NET Core, and the return of LibMan. With 15.8 Preview 2, Microsoft delivers a preview of the new Google Android emulator which is compatible with Hyper-V. This enables the latest Android emulator to work side-by-side with other VMs a developer has running on their workstation.
A nice quality of life addition to the VS2017 installer is the ability to download all of the installation files before beginning the installation. While the default remains beginning the install as soon as there are enough files to do so, this ability is helpful for those with slow or difficult Internet connections as it will not waste time on an install that cannot finish due to an interrupted or incomplete download.
By default, VS2017 will reload the files and documents that were open when opening a solution. This can prove troublesome if there is something about a particular solution that causes errors or unnecessarily long delays. 15.8 adds a new menu option to Tools | Options | Projects | Solutions | General titled "Reopen documents on solution load" which can be disabled if this behavior is not desired.
The CPU profiler tool has seen several noteworthy enhancements, starting with the new function of displaying the asynchronous code in the Call Tree view. Switching the view in CPU Usage to Modules will display "execution cost (sample count) by module (dll) and by function within a module." This makes it easier to dig into the execution of the profiled program and see where attention should be given to improve performance.
F# developers will find a lot to like in 15.8 Preview 2. Several important bug fixes were made and it is now possible to inherit from FSharpFunc an ability that had been disabled in F# 4.1. For .NET SDK projects not using multi-targeting, developers will notice performance improvements in IntelliSense support and syntax colorization.
As a preview, VS2017 15.8 Preview 2 should not be used in production environments. Interested users may upgrade to Preview 2 from within Preview 1 or download a fresh copy directly from Microsoft.