As mentioned in the Visual Studio 2015 IDE blog post, the setup experience of the product now provides more control to the user, for what does and doesn’t get installed. That blog post also talks about the rationale for this change and future direction for Visual Studio install experience. C++ is one of the features which is available as an optional install (not on by default). This ensures that non-C++ developers don’t have to pay the setup time and disk-space price for installing C++ bits that they don’t need. At the same time, C++ developers can still get the pieces they need.
A Note from Steve Carroll, VC++ Dev Manager
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on this change and I wanted to address some common questions and concerns.
The most common question is why is only C++ being made optional. The C++ team made several engineering improvements over the course of the VS2015 release to improve our setup and so we were able to get our packages, compilers, and libs factored out in less time than other parts of Visual Studio. C++ is also very large because of the size of the libraries that we ship across many architectures and their matching PDBs. C++ also requires the installation of a Windows SDK. Many non-C++ developers don’t need any of this very large payload and so the overall VS install experience is significantly improved by this change.
The plan of record as mentioned in the IDE blogpost is to move most of Visual Studio to optional as we move forward. This is the first piece of that ongoing work. I want to reassure C++ developers that there is no de-emphasis of C++ development intended by this change whatsoever. Our telemetry and research tells us that C++ development usage in VS and the industry is accelerating, not shrinking. We continue to invest heavily in C++.
Did I mention we are hiring?
Thanks!
Steve
What’s Different
In Visual Studio 2015, C++ tooling is no longer installed by default. Instead, the C++ compiler, libraries, and project templates have been moved into an optional feature. Upon launching setup, you can choose a “Typical” or “Custom” install:
