Microsoft has taken a leap in the development of modern applications by launching Visual Studio Online, a new set of development services and offerings, part of Microsoft’s Cloud OS, and a connected development experience for helping customers create next generation applications. The next version of Visual Studio – Visual Studio 2013 and .NET framework, .NET 4.5.1 have also been made available simultaneously. Visual Studio Online and Visual Studio 2013 represent the beginning of a new era of modern apps development, combining a powerful desktop integrated development environment (IDE) with rich developer services in the cloud.
Further, delivering on its services promise, Microsoft has also made available a preview of Visual Studio Online “Monaco”, a lightweight browser-based coding environment using standards-based HTML and JavaScript to build cloud services. “Monaco” is complementary to the existing Visual Studio IDE and is an easy way for developers to get started and make quick updates to cloud services on the Windows Azure platform.
As part of Visual Studio Online, Microsoft is releasing a limited preview of Visual Studio Online Applications Insights. “Application Insights” enables teams to support agile application delivery across an organization by providing visibility into how an application runs and is being used by customers. “Application Insights” collects live telemetry data across development, test and production environments and captures availability, performance and usage data, providing teams with a 360-degree view of an application’s health.
This drives great value for businesses as they transform to adopt the biggest technology patterns impacting their customers and workforce. Mobile devices give everyone the potential to access information quicker than ever before, allowing faster decision-making and faster results. In an era where apps are the key to bringing all this decision making and experiences to life on a variety of devices, there is a growing expectation placed on developers to deliver great applications experiences.
S. Somasegar, Corporate Vice President – Developer Division, Microsoft, says, “More than ever, organizations are looking for help in taking advantage of the cloud to transform the way they do business. Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio Online with Windows Azure and MSDN enable businesses to achieve results faster, more affordably and through more well-informed quality decisions than ever before.
Features of Visual Studio 2013 include:
- Peek Definition lets you view a definition in an inline view without leaving the context of your line of code.
- CodeLens in Visual Studio 2013 uses information from both the project metadata and Team Foundation Server 2013 to place decorators on each of the methods in the code that show information such as what changesets led to the creation or recent change, who was the last person to work on the code, what unit tests cover the method (including the latest pass/fail state), and what code references exist. It is also possible to quickly jump into that data, such as an associated changeset or referenced code file with just a click.
- Browser Link connects Visual Studio to one or more open modern browsers in an interactive development experience to keep them in sync with your markup changes without needing manual browser refreshes to see the changes you’re making.
- Office 365 Cloud Business Apps run in the cloud, taking advantage of the rich platform capabilities exposed by Windows Azure and Office 365. As cloud-based apps, they are available to a myriad of devices to aggregate data and services from in and out of an enterprise, and integrate user identities.
- Performance and Diagnostics hub in Visual Studio 2013 provides a unified experience for various tools available in Visual Studio. The hub also makes it easy to identify the performance and diagnostic tools that work with your project and enables you to quickly start using them to improve your application.
- With Agile Portfolio Management you can manage large and complex workloads in an agile way. You can define a hierarchy of backlogs to understand the scope of work across several teams and see how that work rolls up into broader initiatives.
- Team rooms provide an area for fostering and capturing communication among team members, both near and far. Your team room is your team projects activity feed for keeping the team informed of code check-ins, build status, work item changes, and more.
- With support for cloud-based load testing in Visual Studio Online, you can generate scale tests in seconds that utilize the elastic resources of Windows Azure to execute requests from thousands of virtual users; providing you with insight into the performance bottlenecks of your web applications and services without the hassle of managing hardware or a virtual lab.
- The XAML editor now provides advances in IntelliSense, which is now also available for data binding, template binding, and resources. It also enables a more productive transition between design markup and code behind; including support for finding references, going to definition, and switching to the view model.