Today we are sharing Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 RC. This release candidate primarily focuses on stability, performance, and bug fixes, but we also have some feature updates. I’ll share highlights in the rest of this post.

Tools for Apache Cordova. This update includes TACO Update 9 and TACO Update 10, which adds plugins for Intune, Azure engagement, security, and SQLite storage, as well as the ability to add plugins from the config designer either by npm package name or ID. It also includes support for Cordova 6.1.1.

Application Insights and HockeyApp. Developer Analytics Tools v7.0.1 adds has diagnostics tools events for ASP.NET 5 RC1 and ASP.NET Core RC2 projects. We also improved the search experience: search automatically refreshes if you change search criteria such as filters, date ranges, and selected events, and you can go to code from requests in search and also “find telemetry for this…” in the Search menu. For further details, check out the release notes in Microsoft Azure Documentation.

Debugging and Diagnostics. Update 3 RC includes Diagnostics Tool support for applications running on Windows OneCore devices, including HoloLens and Windows IoT. You will now get better performance and reliability in C++ Edit and Continue when FASTLINK is enabled. And we improved XAML UI Debugging so the new Track Focus feature in the Live Visual Tree will cause any selection changes in the Visual Tree to update the currently focused element.

Visual Studio IDE. This update addresses a lot of feedback regarding problems with subscriptions through an online identity or key used to unlock the IDE. You no longer need to login to my.visualstudio.com to activate your subscription. We have improved error handling for common licensing issues. We’ve begun securing all web links such as our terms of service and privacy statement over HTTPS as we already do for personally identifiable information. Additionally, we have made accessibility improvements in the Account Settings dialog for activating a subscription and entering a product key.

C#/VB/Roslyn. In this release you will see many performance improvements including when running code diagnostics on an entire solution. To learn about code diagnostic performance improvements read the How to: Enable and Disable Full Solution Analysis for Managed Code page on MSDN. Other bug fixes include –

• Performance improvements to the C# background code analysis engine that collects errors and warnings. These improvements have also significantly reduced overall memory consumption.
• Performance improvements to the C# GoTo Implementation and Find All References. You can try these by selecting an object, right-clicking on it and then selecting them from the menu.
• You can now enable an option to suggest usings for types in reference assemblies or NuGet packages. You can try this under Tools > Options > Text Editor > C# > Advanced, “Using Directives”.
• When you apply a “fix all” action to document/project/solution we now display a progress bar.

Other updates. This release includes enhancements to Tools for Universal Windows Apps. Architecture tools has updates to address a lot of your feedback around performance and reliability along with updates to features like Code Map, Layer Validation, and UML Diagrams. Visual C++ has updates to the C++ compiler, C++ libraries and C++ MDD in this release.

Check the Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 RC Release Notes and Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 RC Known Issues for all the details. To learn more about other related downloads, see the Downloads page. You can also access the bits and release notes right now on an Azure-hosted VM or download here. You should be able to install this on top of previous installations of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. We’ve also released Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 3 RC today. You can see what’s new there in the TFS Update 3 RC Release Notes. And TFS Update 3 RC Known Issues.

As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Report a Problem option in Visual Studio. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio @JohnMont John is 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.