After months of previews, Microsoft has officially shipped the latest version of its Visual Studio integrated development environment along with an update to its .NET framework.

Visual Studio 2015, which is available to download now, includes a number of key new features and updates compared to its predecessor, such as tools for Universal Windows app development (although these won’t be available until the Windows 10 release date) and cross-platform mobile development for Windows, Android and iOS, including support for Apple Watch.

“Whether it’s developing for the web, the cloud or for mobile, developers are looking for flexibility and choice,” said S. Somasegar, who heads up the Developer Division at Microsoft. “Visual Studio and .NET are providing this choice, offering the ability to target new platforms, to use new programming languages, and to take existing skills and applications to new environments.”

Out of the box, the full-featured version – Visual Studio Enterprise – supports dozens of languages including C# 6, Visual Basic 14, C++, TypeScript 1.5, F# 4.0, Python, and more. Importantly, developers can now build applications for all the popular platforms. Thanks to integration with Apache Cordova, developers can write iOS and Android apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. They can use C++ to build shared components for their iOS, Android and Windows apps. And, thanks to Microsoft’s partnership with Xamarin, developers can extend their .NET applications to iOS and Android.

Microsoft has also updated its .NET Framework to version 4.6, which comes with an update to its web development framework, ASP.NET 4.6, too.

Both products are available to download now. The company has also confirmed it will be releasing the final version of Team Foundation Server 2015 ‘soon’.

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