Fourth Visual Studio '15' preview now available for developers

Microsoft has released the fourth preview version of Visual Studio "15," the code name for the next edition of the company's development tools.

Microsoft says that most of the new Visual Studio preview is now running on the new install engine. That means developers should have a much smaller file size to download (less than 500MB):

There are a couple of "workloads" that aren't present yet, including .NET Core tooling and Azure tooling, but the rest of the existing VS 2015 feature set is available.Apart from the new installer, Preview 4 also includes many other improvements. We have revamped the Start Page experience by adding new Open and Create features to the most frequently used Recent list and the News feed. And C++ has a whole lot of improvements across the board. We are also working on upgrading our feedback systems.

You can check out the full release notes for Visual Studio "15" Preview 4 at Microsoft's site. It's important to note that the company recommends that developers do not install this preview version on critical dev machines. Also, any previous preview versions of Visual Studio "15" should be uninstalled before grabbing Preview 4.

Download Visual Studio "15" Preview 4 from Microsoft

John Callaham