Visual Studio 2015 Update 2
visualcOriginally posted to Chuck Walbourn's Blog on MSDN,
VS 2015 Update 2 is now available for download, including the updated Community edition. The Visual C++ 2015 Update 2 Redistribution packages are also available (x86, x64), as well as the Remote Debugging Tools (x86, x64, ARM). For more information, see the Visual Studio Team blog. Be sure to read the Microsoft Docs page as well.
Per the Visual Studio support lifecycle, “mainstream” support for VS 2015 ended in June 2016. “Extended” support ends October 2025. Platform toolset v140 support is still available in Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 2022 as an optional component.
Compiler and CRT
VS 2015 Update 2 includes a new version of the C/C++ compiler (19.00.23918). There is also a new version of the C/C++ Runtime (14.0.23918). See these posts for details of the compiler and library improvements, along with this list of bug fixes.
Windows 10 SDK: VS 2015 Update 2 includes Windows Tools 1.3 with the Windows 10 SDK for Version 1511 (10.0.10586). As before, this is an optional install. The new Windows Tools 1.3 also adds a UI dialog when creating new UWP projects that prompts for which version of the Windows 10 SDK to use. Note that this same dialog is triggered when using my Direct3D 12 Win32 Game templates–the minimum version value is not used in Win32 projects.
Visual C++ Build Tools 2015: There is a new edition of Visual Studio available without the IDE for those just looking for the compiler toolset.
Related: Visual Studio 2015 RTM, Visual Studio 2015 Update 1, Visual Studio 2015 Update 3