Visual Studio 2015 RTM - I hope the first service release is soon...

As usual I have used VMs to play with the CTP releases for the new version of Visual Studio and fixed up new warnings and build failures in my source so that I’m not too surprised when the RTM comes along.

Unfortunately as soon as I put VS2015 RTM on my build server and started running it as part of my CI system I started noticing strange things…

The first is that it seems to be possible to get VS2015 into a state where it will refuse to load C++ projects. I’ve no idea how I’ve managed this, but it’s now happened twice. Rebooting the machine seems to fix things. The log file that the failure indicates might help shows that it’s trying to load a the “Visual Studio C++ Project System Package” and it’s getting an E_POINTER result…

The second issue seems to be a race condition in shutting down the new process that’s used to help various parts of VS communicate with each other, VSHub.exe. My CI system will fire up a Visual Studio instance to build a project using /build and once that completes another project is likely to get built, sometimes two VS2015 builds will follow one another, other times there are other versions of Visual Studio building in between. VS 2015 appears to start an instance of VSHub.exe but only if one isn’t running (or, more likely, it always starts one but if one’s already running then the new ones shut down). Then when the last instance of VS quits VSHub.exe hangs around for a moment and then shuts down… It seems to crash if it’s shutting down when a new instance of VS2015 is started (and, presumably decides that the VSHub.exe that is shutting down is the one to use). A fix for this issue is simply to keep VSHub.exe alive for the entire time that all VS2015 builds need to run and I can do this by having an instance of VS2015 open on the build machine whilst the CI system is running…

Thanks to Abe10, in this thread, for the workaround for the VSHub.exe issue.

6 out of 10 for this VS release Microsoft, try harder. I hope the Windows 10 team have better QA.