Visual Studio 15 vs 2015 + Update 2

Question

I can choose from two possibilities of new Visual Studio installation

• Visual Studio 15 Preview
• Visual Studio 2015 + Update 2

But I'm a little bit confused what do these versions mean.

• What are the main differences?
• What version is better to choose?
• Can I expect that all the features in VS 15 are available in VS 2015 + Update 2?

Answer 1

Visual Studio 15 is the version after Visual Studio 2015. The "15" is effectively the mostly-internal version number, and the "2015" is the branding version. Yes, it's very confusing.

Other internal/branding mappings:

• Visual Studio 97 / "Boston"
• Visual Studio 6.0 / "Aspen"
• Visual Studio 7 / "Rainier" => Visual Studio .NET 2002
• Visual Studio 7.1 / "Everett" => Visual Studio .NET 2003
• Visual Studio 8 / "Whidbey" => Visual Studio 2005
• Visual Studio 9 / "Orcas" => Visual Studio 2008
• Visual Studio 10 / "Rosario" => Visual Studio 2010
• Visual Studio 11 => Visual Studio 2012
• Visual Studio 12 => Visual Studio 2013
• Visual Studio 14 => Visual Studio 2015

Unless you want to experiment with prerelease software (which can be fun, don't get me wrong) you want to install Visual Studio 2015... and update 2 is the most recent release of that.

We don't yet know what the branded name of Visual Studio 15 will be - mostly because we don't know when it's going to be released.