With just one week until Windows 10 officially launches, Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6, the latest generation of its integrated development environment (IDE) and software framework.

Visual Studio is an incredibly popular tool, used by millions of developers around the world to build the applications that we take for granted. With the new release, Microsoft is giving developers a way to write a single application that’s compatible with all major variants of the Windows platform, including desktop, mobile and even the experimental HoloLens environment. Better still, Microsoft, being the cross-platform company it is these days, says developers can use Visual Studio 2015 to build apps for alternative platforms like Android and iOS. It’s also targeting game development as well, with Cocos, Unity and Unreal.

For those who’re curious to know the full extent of Microsoft’s additions to Visual Studio, the company has penned a blog post highlighting everything new it’s bringing to the table here.

All told, the update comes with hundreds of new features, many of which are focused on debugging, diagnostics, code editing and refactoring.

S. “Soma” Somasegar, Microsoft corporate vice president for its developer division, told Computerworld that one of the most exciting changes is the inclusion of the Roslyn next-generation compiler. Built by Microsoft, Rosyln gives developers dozens of new, advanced debugging capabilities to use with its C# and Visual Basic programming languages.

The Rosyln features are “some of the most important new features for the professional developer,” agreed Al Hilwa, a software analyst at International Data Corp. As an example, Hilwa talked about the Roslyn-based Light Bulbs feature that proactively comes up with ideas to improve running code, or suggestions on how to fix broken code. Roslyn also helps to provide a way for developers to customize warnings and suggestions. For example, the feature could be used in team projects to create a set of warnings that prevent developers from making common mistakes or violating guidelines.

The new features will surely be useful, but the main reason people are getting excited about Visual Studio 2015 is that it’s meant to be the key piece of Microsoft’s Universal Apps story. Visual Studio is designed to be the key platform for building all of those cross-platform apps Microsoft is envisaging, but developers still need to get their hands on other, as-yet-unreleased tools before they can get started. Microsoft is expected to release that tooling on July 29, the same day as Windows 10 launches.

Microsoft released details on pricing for each edition of Visual Studio 2015 back in March. These include the free Visual Studio Community edition aimed at individual developers and developers in small shops; Visual Studio Professional, which costs $1,200 for a one year subscription per user, and $800 for a renewal; and Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN, which costs $6,000 for a new subscription, and $2,570 for a renewal subscription per user per year.

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