Today we released release candidate 2 of TFS 2015 Update 2 and the release candidate of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2.

• Download TFS 2015 Update 2 RC 2
• TFS Release notes
• Download VS 2015 Update 2 RC
• VS Release notes
• Landing page with a full list of downloads

As usual I’ll mostly comment on TFS and TFS related features and let the VS blog cover broader VS topics. In RC1 of TFS, we already released a ton of new compelling capabilities – like:

• The new web based Release Management “V.Next”
• Work item delete and recycle bin
• Lots of dashboard improvements
• Improved pull request experience
• Test results analysis for builds
• Chrome extension for Exploratory testing
• and more…

RC2 brings a bunch more new stuff, including:

• Support for installing extensions from the VS Marketplace in TFS.  We’ll publish the accompanying support to the marketplace shortly after the RC2 is available.  The TFS extension support we are shipping in Update 2 is definitely “minimum viable product” level.  We know that.  We don’t support paid extensions.  The install process is multi-step.  Etc.  This is what we could get done to enable the majority of marketplace extensions with TFS in the Update 2 timeframe.  It will improve in Update 3 and again in TFS 2016.
• Gated checkin support for Build “V.Next”
• Lots of new release management capabilities
  • Support for provisioning in SCVMM.  This brings elements of our Lab Management solution into RM.  (available as a free extension in the marketplace)
  • Support for provisioning in VMWare – wow, that’s been a top customer request for Lab Management for a long time and now we have it.  (available as a free extension in the marketplace)
  • Build integration that allows you to easily see which environments a build has been deployed to.
  • Test results integrated with release so you can correlate test results as your release advances through stages.
  • and more…
• Improved Java support for JUnit and publishing Java code coverage from Linux/Mac.
• Many improvements in the VS Git integration – better performance, better getting started experience, useful status bar indicators, etc.

Lots of good stuff.  Of course, we also took all the feedback we got from RC1 and fixed all the bugs – thank you for all of the bug reports.  Like RC1, this is a go-live release.  You can upgrade directly to it from any public “go-live” release starting with TFS 2010, including the TFS 2015 Update2 RC1 release.  We’d very much appreciate you all giving this a spin and letting us know about any issues you hit.  Unless something surprising happens, I expect this will be the last Update 2 pre-release and the next step is the final release. Thanks, Brian