Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2015 today including many features for developers working outside of the Windows platform.  This release is one of the biggest advances in the Visual Studio platform and also includes .Net 4.6.  Microsoft is celebrating the release of Visual Studio 2015 with an online virtual event including more than 60 on-demand instructional videos.

These releases are the next big step in the journey we outlined last November to bring the productivity of Visual Studio and .NET to any developer working on any kind of application while also delivering a new level of innovation in developer productivity for all Visual Studio developers.  — S. Somasegar’s Blog

While Visual Studio 2015 has many exciting new features, here’s a short list of some of the major advances.

  • Debugging and Diagnostics: Debugging and profiling is now unified into a single Diagnostics Tools window. PerfTips allows you to draw in performance information right in your code as you set breakpoints and step with the debugger.
  • Mobile Development: Visual Studio 2015 includes cross-platform mobile development tools for targeting iOS, Android and Windows, including tools for Apache Cordova, Xamarin, the Visual Studio Emulator for Android and more.
  • Web and Cloud Development: We are making the newest version of our web development framework, ASP.NET 4.6, available today. Additionally, Visual Studio 2015 includes the latest Azure SDK 2.6, providing one-click provisioning and deployment to Azure for websites and cloud services.

To learn more about Visual Studio 2015 features, visit Channel 9 for all of the on-demand videos or you can watch the live stream of the release keynote.  Of course if you just want to get started writing code, you can download Visual Studio 2015 now.