Today we released the next set of reliability and performance improvements in Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 RC, which also addresses issues that we hear from your continued feedback.

Building on what we announced with the CTP release, here’s what you’ll find in Update 2 RC:

• Issues we’ve fixed:
  • Errors in the NuGet Package Manager Console that failed with “A task was canceled.”
  • Crashes due to null and/or invalid pointer reads.
  • Crashes some customers have encountered when opening a solution.
  • Reduced licensing failures and more actionable information when failures occur.
  • C++ projects load faster with improvements in UI delays.
  • Promotion of MSBuild warning MSB3644 (“The reference assemblies for framework {0} were not found”) to error status so incorrect target frameworks that give rise to this error will break a build.
  • Correction of problems in Visual Studio with ASP.NET after installing Update 2 CTP.
• C/C++ runtime library performance: we’ve improved the performance of a number of common operations. For example, extracting floating point numbers with iostreams is up to nineteen times faster. Certain string operations are also faster, especially std::string::replace when replacing same-sized substrings. Give it a try and let us know if you notice a difference.

As with the CTP, we’ve continued to ship additional features as covered fully in the release notes, such as NuGet 3.4 and C#/Visual Basic refactoring to make methods synchronous. A couple of others include:

• Visual Studio now shows Git SCC status in the status bar, and jumping to Changes, Sync, and Connect pages are just a single click away. This is all extensible by third party SCC providers.
• Visual Studio now supports consuming TextMate snippets with IntelliSense completion by placing tmSnippet files into a snippet folder.
• Improvements to the Application Insights search experience with the ability to jump to the code where a telemetry event was emitting, a search for related items, and a new experience to log data from apps.

Again, check the Description of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 RC for all the details.

We’ve also released Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2 RC 2 today. You can see what’s new there in the TFS Update 2 RC 2 release notes.

As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Send Feedback option (Send a Smile) in Visual Studio. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.

John Montgomery is the Director of Program Management for Visual Studio, responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, and .NET. John has been at Microsoft for 17 years, working in developer technologies the whole time. Reach him on Twitter @JohnMont