Microsoft recently launched the newest version of its flagship integrated development platform, the Visual Studio 2013. Aside from an improved IDE, Microsoft also presented an advanced collection of developer cloud tools and services.
Tracey Trewin, Corporate Director for Visual Studio ALM
A couple of pretty cool features of the new IDE were the Peek Definition and the Code Lens. The Peek Definition (Alt + F12) allows you to navigate thru objects within your code without having to leave the current window.
Likewise, the Code Lens displays the References and Unit Tests associated with your code/method. Alt +F2 displays the Reference dialog and ALT +F3 displays the Unit Tests dialog which allows you to view the status of your unit tests as well as Run them. Code Lens also allows you to view change sets and code history when it is linked to the TFS.
Furthermore, the new Visual Studio introduced new tools for team collaboration, planning and project tracking as well as tools for diagnostics, release management and automatic deployment, allowing teams to streamline their development processes.
Below are some of the new features of the Visual Studio 2013:
- 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.
- 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 and social graphs.
- 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 assignment, 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.
To learn more about the Visual Studio 2013, go to visualstudio.com.
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