Allowing support for the Creators Update SDK has been achieved by making improvements to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) Tools. Microsoft says Windows SDK Preview support now allows users to side-by-side install a new SDK. The company points out that this allows customers to carry on making packages for release SDK’s while also running an installed preview. With this ability, new APIs and functionality can be used without needing a separate machine. With the Visual Studio 2017 Update Preview, users get version 10.0.15052.0 of the Windows SDK. Importantly, Microsoft says customers will see the best results if they are running Windows Insider build 15055 of later. Visual Studio 2017 Update Preview introduces the ability to create streaming UWP packages. Microsoft says this is the first VS version to offer the capability. Microsoft has also brought new Python tools to the suite. Specifically, developers can use the Python development workload for editing and debugging scripts. It is worth noting that this is essentially the same Python Tools experience we have had since Visual Studio 2015. However, in VS 2017 it has been enhanced with new abilities and features. In its announcement, Microsoft also discusses the following new features in VS 2017:
PackageReference support in UWP projects New .NET Native compiler distributed as a NuGet package Better Visual Studio integration for XAML controls delivered as NuGet packages Support for detecting SDK version specific code in XAML Command Line Arguments in Debug Mode
Visual Studio 2017
Customers coming to Visual Studio 2017 should know that Microsoft has changed the way in which updates can be installed. The company now allows previews to run side-by-side with full release VS installations. This allows the use of a stable VS 2017 release while still testing features from a preview build. I already mentioned how this works for Windows SDK, but it is relevant for all Update Preview releases. Microsoft says when two installations are on a single machine (stable and preview), users will see two different taskbar icons. The full release version icon will be solid, while the preview will be transparent.
