We announced the availability of Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate a few weeks ago at Connect(); 2016. For those of you who tried it, let me start by saying, “Thank you!” Already you’ve submitted several hundred issues and requests and we’re using your feedback and the telemetry on the product to improve greatly.

To get the latest version of our Visual Studio 2017 RC, you can download directly from here. If you already have the RC installed, you will receive a notification in the upper-right of your Visual Studio window. There you will find a notification saying, “Update to Visual Studio” which will install the latest RC release.

We’ve been busy fixing issues (many of those you reported) and today we are sharing an update to the RC. To find out all of the fixes and updates included in this release, please take a look at the Visual Studio 2017 Release Notes and Known Issues.

Here are a couple of changes that I’d like to call out:

• To start, there are many bug fixes, including fixing an issue in Git syncing in Team Explorer that led to “Could not load current branch,” some crashes and hangs in loading large projects, and some bugs in Go To All.
• We now have offline help available by installing the Help Viewer component in the Visual Studio installer.
• You can now add and remove multiple user interface languages at any time using the Visual Studio installer on the Language Pack tab. You can select the current user interface language among those installed using Tools > Options > International Settings.
• We improved the .NET Core and Docker workload. It’s still in preview, but we made the csproj file easier to read, added new commands to the .NET Core command-line (CLI) tools, and made many bug fixes. See the .NET blog for details.
• We improved the Developer Analytics Tools. CodeLens now shows exceptions that have occurred during local debug sessions for projects with the Application Insights SDK and it can show the impact an exception has had on users.

We’re continuing to iterate on the release candidate and will post more updates, so we definitely want your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Report a Problem option in the upper right corner of the VS title bar. Track your feedback on the developer community portal. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio @JohnMont is responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, C++, C#, VB, .NET and JavaScript. John has been at Microsoft for 18 years working in developer technologies.