Today at the Connect(); // 2016 conference Microsoft has announced the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2017, formerly known as Visual Studio “15” whose last public beta was Preview 5. I think that this is going to be a great release, because Visual Studio 2015 was very heavy, bloated and slow unless you had a powerful machine and this new version has been greatly optimized and made granular so you only install the pieces (“workloads”) that you need.

To learn what’s new in VS 2017 RC read: Visual Studio 2017 RC

Now, if you are a developer of extensions for Visual Studio, you have work to do. Visual Studio 2017 introduces version 3.0 of the manifest (which is backwards compatible with previous versions) but requires that your extension declares the components required in the new modular setup.

To learn how to migrate your extension to VS 2017 read How to: Migrate Extensibility Projects to Visual Studio 2017.

To learn what’s new in the Visual Studio 2017 SDK read What’s New in the Visual Studio 2017 SDK.

See also:

FAQ for Visual Studio 2017 extensibility

Breaking Changes in Visual Studio 2017 extensibility

Ngen support in VSIX v3

Installing to external directories

Measuring extension impact in startup

The Visual Studio Gallery is also being revamped and renamed to Visual Studio Marketplace and you can manage your extension using the URL https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/manage, although some features are not migrated yet from the Visual Studio Gallery.

I have migrated my MZ-Tools extension to work with VS 2017 RC and I have sim-shipped it with Microsoft publishing it today on the Visual Studio Gallery/Marketplace. In a next post I will explain the issues that I have found in the process.