Yesterday, Microsoft streamed live its first ever Connect(); event.
Connect(); is a cloud-first, mobile-first, code-first virtual event focused on current and future technologies for developers creating applications across a variety of platforms. Build on your current skills, unleash your creativity, and expand what’s possible to deliver unprecedented innovations.
If you didn’t have a chance to watch the live streaming of Microsoft’s Connect(); event yesterday, you can watch the session videos here – http://aka.ms/connectondemand.
You can watch day 2’s live stream here: http://aka.ms/connect
The Announcements
There were lots of great announcements yesterday. Here is a summarized version of most of them:
- OSS – The .NET Core Framework stack is now open source!
- Cross-Platform: Microsoft commits to providing an official .NET Core Framework distribution for Linux and the Mac operating system (read more)
- Visual Studio Community 2013 edition – a new, free version of Visual Studio that supports all project types and extensions. This version is completely free for the following scenarios:
- Any individual developer working on a commercial or non-commercial project
- Any developer contributing to an open source project
- Anyone in an academic research or course setting (e.g. students, teachers, classroom, online course)
- Any non-enterprise organization with 5 or fewer developers working on a commercial/non-commercial project together
- Read more and download at www.visualstudio.com.
- Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 4 – Update 4 (RTW) is now available for download here.
- Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 Public Preview – a public preview of the next version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework are now available for download here.
- Release Management for VSO – Microsoft’s Release Management tool now provides support for Visual Studio Online.
- CodeLens – CodeLens, a Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Update 4 feature (and later), now supports Visual Studio Online projects.
- “Smart Unit Tests” – a new feature integrated into Visual Studio 2015 that can be used to inspect your code and generate tests that exercise all branches of your code.
- Git Improvements – several enhancements have been made to improve the Git experience in Visual Studio 2015.
- Web-Based Editing – (coming soon) you will now have the ability to edit files directly within the Visual Studio Online (web) interface. This will make the editing of Markdown files extremely easy in VSO.
- Build v.Next – (coming soon) a new, web-based, cross-platform build service was demoed. The web-based interface is much simpler to use than the current XAML/Workflow-based build system (no more Workflow!)… you “compose” a build definition by selecting from a set of available tasks and setting the respective parameters accordingly. If you’ve worked in other build systems such as TeamCity or Jenkins, it will be an easy transition. The new build agents will support Linux and Mac operating systems as well (yes, you will be able to create VSO-based builds that can build your Android and iOS apps!)
- Code Search – (coming soon) a new code search feature (finally!) is being built into Visual Studio Online. This capability is built on top of Elasticsearch and provides “smart” search options – e.g. the ability to search in class names only, methods only, comments, specific file types, etc.
Although this covers the majority of yesterday’s vast list of announcements, there are a ton of details behind each of these. I’ll be writing more about the new features in the coming weeks. Lots of great stuff here!
Remember, you can catch today’s sessions live here: http://aka.ms/connect