As announced today by Soma, we’ve just released the first CTP (Community Technology Preview) of the next version of Visual Studio. This is doubly-exciting as this is the first public release of a version of Visual Studio powered by “Roslyn” by default. At BUILD we released the “Roslyn” End User Preview which extends Visual Studio 2013 by replacing some components with their “Roslyn” equivalents but this version of Visual Studio is built from the ground up on “Roslyn” with “Roslyn”.

The Visual Studio “14” CTP includes new and improved language and IDE features for Visual Basic such as multiline strings and a full-fledged refactoring experience:

And Metadata-as-Source:

(Invoke the Go to Definition command on a symbol not defined in your source project)

These are just some of the small but powerful enhancements we’re building for VB developers and we’re far from done. But that’s no reason for you to wait. Since we’ve literally rebuilt the very foundations of VB it couldn’t be more critical for us to get your feedback early and often on what you like, don’t like, love, and what you want to see more of.

Stay tuned for more posts from the Managed Languages team highlighting new and improved language features and experiences. In the meantime…

• Download the Visual Studio “14” CTP
• Learn more about what’s in the Visual Studio “14” CTP
• Submit bugs through Connect, suggestions on UserVoice and quick thoughts via Send-a-Smile in the Visual Studio IDE.

And one more thing: Visual Studio side-by-side support is not available on this early build. DO NOT install this CTP (or feed it after midnight) on a machine with any other version of Visual Studio installed.

Regards,

Anthony D. Green, Program Manager, Visual Basic and C# Languages Team