Microsoft is solving a major pain point developers have with Visual Studio. In response to complaints about the Visual Studio sign-in process, Microsoft has released improvements to prompt less sign-ins.
“Pretty much every time I fire up Visual Studio, I get greeted by the little yellow warning symbol asking me to re-enter my credentials,” one complaint read.
The update is designed to keep users securely signed in and eliminate the previous forced sign-in. “This addresses the most commonly reported sign-in issue,” wrote John Montgomery, director of program management for Visual Studio, in a blog post. “The next time you’re prompted to sign in, Visual Studio will follow the new authentication flow that lets you stay signed into the IDE without reentering your credentials every 12 hours.”
(Related: COBOL comes to Visual Studio 2015)
In addition, the company announced the .NET Framework Monthly Rollup in order to align .NET Framework updates with Windows Monthly Rollup.
“Historically, we have released individual patches for these platforms, which allowed you to be selective with the updates you deployed,” wrote Nathan Mercer, a Microsoft employee, in a blog post. “This resulted in fragmentation, where different PCs could have a different set of updates installed leading to multiple potential problems.”
Beginning in October, users will be able to install a new update for the .NET Framework and Windows, which will provide all the latest security and quality improvements. In addition, there will be a .NET Framework and Windows Security-only Monthly update to install just security updates.
“Our goal is eventually to include all of the patches we have shipped in the past since the last baseline, so that the Monthly Rollup becomes fully cumulative and you need only to install the latest single rollup to be up to date. We encourage you to move to the Monthly Rollup model to improve reliability and quality,” Mercer wrote.
