18 May 2015

VSO Status Inspector Extension for Visual Studio

Utilities, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015
If you are a long-time user of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Online (VSO) then there is a decent chance that you’ve had to endure one or more “hiccups” over the past year or so. Today, if VSO seems to be running a little slow – or not at all – you probably go out to the VSO Support page to check the current status of VSO. There, you will see something like this at the top of the page: Clicking on the Visual Studio Service Blog link will take you to a page with more details (if there are issues being…
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08 Apr 2015

Building with Microsoft Tools–For FREE!

Azure, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio Online
With two of Microsoft’s primary competitors (Apple and Google) offering their development tools free of charge (Xcode and Android Studio, respectively) have you ever wished you could develop on Microsoft’s platforms for FREE? Well… if you didn’t already know that Microsoft offers a good number of development tools and services for free, then read on Visual StudioAlthough it hasn’t been around long (it was announced at last year’s Connect(); event) Microsoft now provides, for no charge, Visual Studio Community 2013. This edition is essentially the same product as Visual Studio 2013 Professional – with a few restrictions placed on usage.Visual…
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06 Apr 2015

VS 2013 Premium vs. VS 2015 Professional

Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015
As announced recently, Microsoft is merging the Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate editions into a single, new edition – Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise. This is a free upgrade for active Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN subscribers – until your subscription renews. At the point of renewal, there will be a slight increase in price (actual price will vary based on whether or not you are buying a single subscription or if your company has a volume licensing agreement, etc.) to maintain the Enterprise subscription.I recently wrote up a comparison between Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN and Visual Studio…
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04 Apr 2015

VS 2013 Premium vs. VS 2015 Enterprise

Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015
As I recently covered, Microsoft has announced that the Visual Studio Premium with MSDN and Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN editions will be combined into a single, new edition for Visual Studio 2015 – Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise with MSDN.If you have an active Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN subscription, you will be upgraded, for FREE, to the Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise w/MSDN edition when the final product becomes available later this year. Once your subscription runs out, however, you will have to start paying for the new Enterprise edition (because the Premium edition will no longer exist).Although the price…
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14 Nov 2014

What Features are in Visual Studio Community 2013?

Visual Studio 2013
In case you missed it, Microsoft announced a new, FREE version of Visual Studio at their Connect(); event this past Wednesday – Visual Studio Community 2013. This is a brand new edition that will likely replace the Express SKUs available today. You can use the Community edition for FREE in the following scenarios: Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps. An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source…
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17 Oct 2014

Visual Studio/TFS 2013 Update 4 RC Available

TFS 2013, Visual Studio 2013
In case you missed it, Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 RC (Release Candidate) is now available for download. Also, this is a “go-live” release which means you can use this update in production environments and there will be a supported upgrade path from the RC to the final release (RTM) version. What’s in Update 4? You can view the details of this release here along with some of the ALM-specific improvements here, and web-specific enhancements here. However, here are some of the highlights: CodeLens improvements Lots of updates to Release Management Review and merge code with Git pull requests New…
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19 Aug 2014

Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio

Utilities, Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio 2013
Microsoft has introduced a new Visual Studio extension – Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio (currently tagged as Beta). This extension allows you, the developer, to locate millions of code snippets and sample projects from within the Visual Studio IDE. Essentially, this extension combines the features of two previous extensions: Bing Code Search and Sample Browser. Code Snippets in IntelliSense The Bing Developer Assistant extension provides some nice additions to the Visual Studio IntelliSense experience. Most notably, it can provide you with a code snippet that is relevant to the API you are actively coding against. For example, in the…
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02 Jul 2014

Visual Studio/TFS 2013 Update 3–Release Candidate

Visual Studio 2013
Microsoft released today Visual Studio 2013 (and Team Foundation Server) Update 3 Release Candidate (RC). There is a great video on Microsoft’s Channel 9 site covering many of the features and enhancements in Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 RC. If you don’t have the time (or desire) to watch the video right now (it’s about 50 minutes in length) then keep reading… Here is a summary showing some of what’s new in Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 (RC): CodeLens Probably the biggest change with CodeLens is that it now supports Git-based repositories. Since it works against a local Git repository,…
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23 Jan 2014

Using Git and Visual Studio Online (Part 1 of 4)

User Group, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio Online
At our latest Omaha ALM User Group meeting, a couple of nights ago, Paul Oliver gave a talk on using Git with Visual Studio Online (formerly known as Team Foundation Service). Even though we didn’t record his session Paul has decided to do a set of screencasts of his talk. The first of four parts is now available on YouTube which you can watch below. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FgR9cwXhc8#t=23] We will post the links to the remaining videos as Paul gets them produced.
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21 Jan 2014

Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 Released

Visual Studio 2013
The final release of Update 1 for Visual Studio 2013 is now available. This update consists mainly of a collection of bug fixes and there is no update for Team Foundation Server 2013 with this release (there will be an update to TFS with the release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2). You can see the list of fixed issues in KB2911573. Here are the links for the various updates: Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 Release Management for Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Update 1
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