I have recently installed Visual Studio 2015, which was released last week, and plan to have it replace my current Visual Studio 2013 in my day to day workflow as soon as possible. If the first project I migrated proves to be indicative of the smoothness of the procedure, I’m all good. A fairly large database project (SQL Server Data Tools) opened immediately without even the slightest change to project or solution files.

The only change to the solution folders that I noticed, was a new (hidden) folder named .vs. This folder will hold your user or machine specific settings files from now on (like the .suo file). I like the idea: these are files that should not be checked in to source control. Now I can easily exclude the folder and be done with it, instead of excluding the files one by one based on name or extension. It also looks a lot cleaner in Explorer (and I like it when things look clean).

Now this first one was a project I work on alone, but for other projects there are more developers, not all of which have moved to VS2015 yet. Looks like I can start working from 2015 while the other team members migrate in their own pace. Of course in that case I’d have to wait using new language or framework features, but I can still benefit from improvements to the IDE and debugger.