Just over a month after the release of CTP 1, Microsoft has officially released another community technology preview of the next version of Visual Studio, codenamed “14.”

Visual Studio director of program management John Montgomery announced the release of Visual Studio “14” CTP 2 in a blog post, explaining that the new preview, which Microsoft released for testing and feedback purposes, contains several new features on top of what was implemented in CTP 1. Some of the main features added include:

(Related: Everything you need to know about Visual Studio 2013)

  • Save and Apply Custom IDE Layouts: Save and apply custom layouts for tool windows in the IDE and rename, reorder, and delete layouts from Manage Window Layouts. The Save Window Layout and Apply Window Layout commands are under the Window Menu.
  • Light Bulb Editor Adornment: Light Bulbs are an extensible editor adornment to identify and help fix issues in code. Place a caret on a line with an issue or hover over an issue to see a light bulb listing actions to resolve the problem and preview proposed solutions.
  • Editor Touch Support: Visual Studio Editor now supports touch gestures for scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, tap-and-hold for context menus, double-tap for word selection, and line selection by tapping in the margin.
  • VC++ Property Pages and Editor Enhancements: Configuration and Platform dropdown values updated for VC++ Property Page dialog to remember the last user selection when the dialog is closed. CTP 2 also adds Move Function Definition (move the body of a function definition to source or header/in-class definition) and Implement Pure Virtuals (quickly create definitions for a class that inherits constructs ([abstract] class, struct, etc.) containing pure virtuals).

For a complete list of new features in Visual Studio “14” CTP 2, head over to the knowledge base article. To download this latest IDE community preview, download the bits or, for cloud users, download via the VM in Azure.