{"id":6084,"date":"2016-04-01T08:30:14","date_gmt":"2016-04-01T15:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/?p=6084"},"modified":"2019-10-24T17:38:59","modified_gmt":"2019-10-25T00:38:59","slug":"faster-leaner-visual-studio-installer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/faster-leaner-visual-studio-installer\/","title":{"rendered":"Faster, Leaner, Focused on Your Development Needs: The New Visual Studio Installer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Visual Studio continues to grow in power and capability with each release. Our objective is to provide every developer with the tools you need to be successful whether you\u2019re building mobile, cloud,\u00a0or desktop apps regardless of your language or framework. Now that Visual Studio includes tools for Any Developer building Any App, it also includes hundreds of packages in the full\u00a0installation. They come from Microsoft and others, and include runtimes and SDKs, emulators, tools and documentation. Keeping the right components installed and updated on your machine is one of the core values That Visual Studio provides \u2013 which is quite a task given the rapid evolution of developer frameworks.<\/p>\n

In Visual Studio 2015, we made progress toward reducing the size of the minimum install <\/del>by separating out the C++ compilers and build tools into optional components. We\u2019ve also been listening to your feedback on UserVoice<\/a>, Twitter and through the Report-a-Problem tool built into Visual Studio. What we\u2019ve heard from your feedback falls into three primary themes:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Visual Studio should have a lighter footprint, with less files on disk, and fewer required system dependencies.<\/li>\n
  2. Visual Studio should have better customization, making it easier to install what you need without adding languages and frameworks that weren\u2019t selected.<\/li>\n
  3. Visual Studio installation, updates, and uninstallation to be both faster and more predictable.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In an effort to address each of these themes, let’s go into a bit of detail.<\/p>\n

    Lightweight and Fast Installation<\/h2>\n

    We\u2019ve taken a fresh look at the component layering and dependencies in Visual Studio. We\u2019ve carved out a minimal \u2018code editor\u2019 experience. This minimum install<\/a> is just a couple of hundred megabytes in size but it contains core elements of the product common across languages and usage patterns.<\/p>\n

    This \u2018core editor\u2019 experience includes the shell itself, the code editor, the managed and native debugger engines, and source code control support. To support many programming languages without the support of full compilers, we also included a TextMate-compatible language service (introduced in Visual Studio 2015 Update 1<\/a>.) This service enables basic language colorization, IntelliSense, and symbolic search for over twenty languages including C#, Visual Basic, Java, C\/C++, HTML, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Ruby, R, Swift, and Go. Lastly, we added a new feature \u201cOpen Folder\u201d, which enables developers to work with any codebase without needing to create a Visual Studio project or solution.<\/p>\n

    As a result, the minimum install footprint went from 6GB to 322 MB. Based on early testing, this installs in just a few minutes on a typical development machine. While this core editor installation includes only a subset of the full product, it provides a clean, dependable foundation on which we can create tailored development experiences.<\/p>\n

    Optimized for You<\/h2>\n

    Layered on top of the core editor, we\u2019ve taken the other tooling and SDKs developers need and packaged them into bundles that represent a few common developer experiences. We think of\u00a0<\/span>these bundles as a curated preset \u2013 a good starting point to help you get up and running quickly.<\/p>\n

    In this early preview of our new installer<\/a>, we have made the first four bundles available to install: .NET desktop development, Python, C++ or games development with Unity. This is of course only a subset of the full set of languages and frameworks that Visual Studio supports. In future updates, we plan to provide the ability to tweak these bundles for more \u00e0 la carte<\/i> control over what\u2019s installed.<\/p>\n

    \"New<\/p>\n

    Here is a quick visual summary of the bundles we are including in this first preview of the new installation environment:<\/p>\n

    \"Installer<\/p>\n

    In a future post, we will talk more about the customer research that is helping us design these developer bundles and the principles that will determine what goes into each.<\/p>\n

    Isolated and Low-Impact<\/h2>\n

    Under the hood, we\u2019ve also been changing the way we distribute the core application to make Visual Studio installation faster, more reliable, and more flexible. Across the Visual Studio teams, we\u2019ve been working to reduce the impact we have on the system. We have done this by moving assemblies out of the Global Assembly Cache, reducing use of the system registry, and simplifying the way we install the Visual Studio application itself. We will share more about this work in a future post.<\/p>\n

    This work enables installation and uninstallation to be much faster and more flexible than before.<\/p>\n

    Caveats and Next Steps<\/h2>\n

    This is an early preview of our work and we still have plenty to enable before we can fully encompass all the functionality delivered by the current Visual Studio install experience. In the interim, as we continue to add new capabilities and complete the componentization and refactoring work, the \u2018classic\u2019 installer is also available as a way to install the full Visual Studio feature set.<\/p>\n

    As this is a preview, we\u2019ve noted several of the limitations in the installer and product in the release notes<\/a>. We\u2019ll be updating this list as new issues are discovered.<\/p>\n

    As many Visual Studio tools depend on the installation of other components \u2013 including emulators, third-party SDKs and tools<\/a> \u2013 the install size can still grow to gigabytes when all options are selected in the full product. But the work we\u2019ve done in this preview is a substantial investment in our goal of providing a faster, more flexible, less impactful experience that gets you running quickly with just the tools you need.<\/p>\n

    We\u2019d love your feedback on these experiences. The best way to do so is to click the \u2018Send us feedback<\/a>\u2019 link in the new installer or through Report a Problem in Visual Studio itself. You can also add a new suggestion or comment on an existing suggestion on the Visual Studio UserVoice site<\/a>. We\u2019re excited to hear from you!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    \"\"<\/td>\nTim Sneath<\/strong>, Principal Lead Program Manager, Visual Studio Platform<\/p>\n

    Tim leads a team focused on Visual Studio acquisition and extensibility. His mission is to see developers create stunning applications built on the Microsoft platform, and to persuade his mother that her computer is not an enemy. Amongst other strange obsessions, Tim collects vintage releases of Windows, and has a near-complete set of shrink-wrapped copies that date back to the late 80s.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Visual Studio continues to grow in power and capability with each release. Our objective is to provide every developer with the tools you need to be successful whether you\u2019re building mobile, cloud,\u00a0or desktop apps regardless of your language or framework. Now that Visual Studio includes tools for Any Developer building Any App, it also includes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":255385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1085,1196,472,4980,1028,155],"tags":[237,1383,137,376,124,172,182,653,12],"class_list":["post-6084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cloud","category-desktop","category-gaming","category-java","category-mobile","category-visual-studio","tag-net","tag-c","tag-html","tag-java","tag-javascript","tag-python","tag-unity","tag-visual-basic","tag-visual-studio"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

    Visual Studio continues to grow in power and capability with each release. Our objective is to provide every developer with the tools you need to be successful whether you\u2019re building mobile, cloud,\u00a0or desktop apps regardless of your language or framework. Now that Visual Studio includes tools for Any Developer building Any App, it also includes […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}