Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 support plans?

Question

With the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2015 (likely by the end of this month, at Microsoft Build Developer Conference | April 29 – May 1, 2015  ), what can we expect for support of the SDK in Visual Studio 2015. (yes, it's related to my other question Can we use the .NET SDK for building an ASP.NET MVC Web Application?​)

Also, where can we find details about Esri's plans for the new version of the Framework? While we don't have a strong interest in the new Core, support for what is currently called 4.6 is important to us.

Regards,

Eric.

TimDowning · Answer

According to the Microsoft Partner Network Product Usage Guide, downgrade rights are not part of the software licensing.

The relevant part of the FAQ on the MSPP site is:

Does the Microsoft Partner Network grant downgrade rights?

No. The Microsoft Partner Network does not offer downgrade rights.  You have 12 months to upgrade from the previous version of software offered by the Microsoft Partner Network to the latest version.  Refer to the software updates table for details.  Note: this downgrade policy does not apply to commercial training licenses granted with the Learning competency and MSDN benefits received as part of the Microsoft Partner Network.

https://mspartner.microsoft.com/en/us/pages/membership/software-licensing-benefits-faqs.aspx

I'm also trying to confirm this with our IT who manages our Microsoft Partnership.

SomeGISGuy · Answer

I'm curious about this requirement? (I'm a daily MSDN-licensed user as well). With VS2013 you can also license by signing in with your MSDN account instead of providing a license key. Are you sure you can't just use this approach to continue on VS2013?

Having said that, we are in the process of certifying for the new tools and platforms. If you require the manifest editor and deployment tool, this won't install into VS2015, but if you don't need this, you _should_ be ok (but again we are still working on certifying so we can say we officially support it). I've been using VS2015 for a while and haven't seen any issues personally.

Wrt to .NET 4.6 that is still pending certification. According to Microsoft it's supposed to work with very few gotcha, so you're probably fine. Again we haven't certified yet but working on it. Same goes for Windows 10 Universal support. We are in the process of certifying this. We know for sure Windows 10 Mobile won't work (not supported to use native 8.1 SDKs in a WinMobile10 app), but so far it's looking good for Windows 10 Universal Desktop apps - in fact the upcoming ArcGIS Collector app for Windows is a Windows 10 Universal app, and the team haven't reported any issues here either. Keep an eye on our blog in the coming months for official word on whether it's fully supported.

The major Quartz release coming next year will fully support all these things.

TimDowning · Answer

Our MSDN partnership requires that we upgrade to Visual Studio 2015 by July 2016.  In the past this date could be "stretched" but now with Visual Studio requiring a Microsoft login to check the license we will have to meet the July 2016 requirement.  With esri being a critical library we'd really like to see support for VS 2015 with enough lead time before July 2016 to test it and plan the VS upgrade.