The IDE itself retained the dark theme aesthetic introduced in VS 2012, but the UI felt more refined. However, performance was a mixed bag. While the introduction of Roslyn made the editor smarter, it also increased memory consumption. Early versions of VS 2015 were notorious for being resource-heavy, leading to sluggish performance on machines with less than 8GB or 16GB of RAM. Microsoft addressed many of these issues in subsequent Updates (Update 1, 2, and 3), but the "heavyweight" nature of the IDE remained a point of friction for some developers.
If you’re still running a legacy project on VS 2015, you know exactly why it refuses to die. And if you’re on VS 2022, take a moment to thank Roslyn, the C++11 support, and the cross-platform tooling—all of which cut their teeth in the 2015 release. microsoft visual studio 2015