Keeping with the quick cadence of releases, I’m happy to share Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6. Additionally, we are also announcing the release of Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP. You can download both these releases from the download center or from MSDN subscriber downloads. Don’t want to wait? Save time and try out this latest CTP on one of the public VMs hosted on Azure. Before you head off to try out the bits, I’d like to go over a few highlights from both of these releases, and to remind you to also check out Brian Harry’s blog post, Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP Release Notes, and Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 Release Notes for more details.

Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6

First things first: after we shipped CTP 5 we saw a notable increase in “frowns” sent through Send-a-Smile as well as feedback from some of our top customers, and we quickly saw that CTP 5 had a handful of issues that made it pretty painful to use including an issue with PDB file locking that affected a lot of customers.

It’s true that for each CTP, we want to quickly share more new features so you can tell us what works and what doesn’t. Finding the right balance among all the factors (ship velocity, quality, and team capacity, to name a few) is energizing, to put it mildly. That said, we expect our CTPs to meet a “reasonable use” quality bar and, based on your feedback, CTP 5 didn’t achieve that bar.

I want to thank everyone who tried CTP 5 and gave us feedback. With CTP 6 we have addressed almost all the issues you’ve reported, and you should see a more stable release.

We’ve also added a lot of capabilities to the release (detailed in the Visual Studio 2015 CTP6 release notes), and I’ll call out a few of the more interesting ones here.

Single Sign in. One of the pieces of customer feedback we get consistently is that developers – particularly developers who use multiple Microsoft services such as Azure, the Windows Store, MSDN Subscriptions, and Visual Studio Online together – have to sign in many times in several places. We continue to work at addressing the problem. With CTP 6, we’ve taken the next step. Until now, each service you used while developing your application required a separate sign in, be it to a cloud backend data store, source code enlistment, or online store publishing dashboard. Each of these services not only required a separate sign in but also managed their individual sign in user state separately. With CTP 6, once you sign into the first cloud service, we will automatically sign you into the next one, which can significantly reduce the number of authentication prompts you will see.

ASP.NET Improvements. We continue to refine ASP.NET 5. With this release you’ll see performance improvements in the ASP.NET runtime as well as discoverability improvements to the New Web Project dialog, updates to IntelliSense for JSON configuration files, and updates to make package restore for bower, NPM, and NuGet simpler. To learn more about these updates check out this detailed blog post on ASP.NET updates.

Xamarin Integration Improvements. As of this CTP, Xamarin developers using Visual Studio can now reference, build, and debug C++ library projects from their Android projects directly by leveraging the Android targeting experience introduced by Visual C++. Check out the VC++ blog post for an upcoming post soon that will share details on how to develop Xamarin Android Native apps. Additionally, you can now directly install Xamarin during the Visual Studio installation process by selecting it from the list of 3rd party dependencies.

Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova. Over the last few releases, we listened to your feedback and broadened the number of devices you can debug to: Android 4.4, Android 4.3 and earlier with jsHybugger, iOS 6, 7, and 8, and Windows Store 8.1. With CTP6, we are broadening our debugging support further. You can now debug your Apache Cordova apps that target Windows Phone 8.1:

You can set breakpoints, inspect variables, use the console, and perform other debugging tasks on your Windows Phone 8.1 emulator or attached device. Learn more about the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova.

CodeLens. With CodeLens, you can find out more about your code while staying focused on your work in the editor. In this CTP, you can now see the history of your C++, SQL, or JavaScript files versioned in Git repositories by using CodeLens file-level indicators. When working with source control in Git and work items in TFS, you can also can get information about the work items associated with C++, SQL, or JavaScript files by using CodeLens file-level work items indicators.

Architecture Tools. In previous releases you told us that Code Maps were not reactive enough, were sometimes complex to use, and did not always produce a useful result. So, with this release, we've improved the tool responsiveness, simplified the Architecture menu, and reduced clutter through node filtering (which complements the link filtering we provided in VS 2015 Preview). We also made the initial maps of a solution far more useful by grouping nodes based on the solution folders, and by styling project/assembly nodes to indicate their type. Check out this blog post to learn about all the improvements to Code Maps in this CTP.

NuGet. NuGet receives a major face-lift in this release to help make it clearer how to search for the packages you need. This interface improvement also makes it easier to update and manage the versions of the packages you already have installed. We've also implemented a new v3 API with blazing fast search capabilities. Make sure you grab the NuGet extension from the ‘Extensions and Updates’ menu and check out the updates! Check out blog.nuget.org for more details.

XAML UI Debugging. Visual Studio has had a DOM inspector for HTML apps for several releases, and it’s a powerful tool for quickly finding and tweaking UI – it’s also one many customers asked us to create for XAML. Enter the Live Visual Tree and Live Property Explorer, which represent the first of the new UI Debugging tools for XAML, and are now available to try with your WPF projects. These tools let you inspect the visual tree of your application during a debug session. They also let you review and modify DependencyProperty objects on the elements in the tree. Read the post on new UI Debugging Tools for XAML to learn more.

These UI Debugging tools appear when you start debugging a WPF desktop application. Right now, this feature doesn't currently support Windows Store apps, but we are working hard to bring this to you soon.

.NET Debugging. CTP 6 improves .NET debugging in several ways. To start, we've made debugging .NET applications significantly faster when calling third party libraries that throw a large number of internal exceptions. For more details see Performance Improvement When Debugging .NET Code With Visual Studio 2015. We've also improved Edit & Continue, with support for new edit operations including adding and modifying post-2005 language features (such as iterators and async/await) and adding nested and top-level types (such as delegates, enums, and interfaces). To learn more check out the C# blog post on Edit and Continue and VB blog post on Edit and Continue.

The Make Object ID command from previous versions of Visual Studio is back in Visual Studio 2015 CTP6. If you hadn't heard, Object IDs let you tag an object instance and track it over the remainder of your debugging session even if you switch to a different context where there are no variables in scope referring to that instance. This lets you observe how a particular object's state may change over its lifetime. Now you can use the familiar $id syntax used with other debugger variables to refer back to those objects in the Watch and Immediate windows and conditional breakpoints.

Lastly, we've released the new Exception Settings tool window which provides an easy way to configure the debugger’s exception settings. You can access this new window from the Debug menu under Debug -> Windows -> Exception Settings. Read more about how to use the Exception Settings Tool Window.

Visual Studio Emulator for Android. We've updated with the Visual Studio Emulator for Android with new features, including Lollipop (API Level 21) debug targets. We've added OpenGL ES support, multi-touch input simulation, and advanced camera simulation. Read this post on the new features in Visual Studio Emulator for Android to learn more.

Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP

We also shipped TFS 2015 CTP today, but some of the changes may not be readily apparent because they’re about licensing and which capabilities are available in which TFS edition. In particular, we've made more features available with a “Basic” five- or fewer-member license, including web-based text execution, agile portfolio management, work item chart authoring, and team rooms.

Of course, we've also included capabilities you can see. We've improved merge performance especially for large repos, for example. And you can also now easily view the history of changes to a file by right clicking on any folder in Solution Explorer. We added JSON REST APIs to enable you to easily create and query work items, queue a build, or access source code from any device, platform, or technology stack, including Windows, Android, iOS, Node.js. And you can also use service hooks to get an instant notification for events in Team Foundation Server, directly in your app or service.

To learn more about these and all other improvements check out Brian Harry’s blog post and the Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP Release Notes.

As always, please give us your feedback, suggestions, thoughts, and ideas on our UserVoice site, through the in-product Send-a-Smile and Send-a-Frown UI, or file a bug through the Visual Studio Connect site.

Thanks!

John

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management, Visual Studio Platform John has been at Microsoft for 15 years, working in developer technologies the whole time. Most recently before working on the Visual Studio core development environment, he was working on the tools for Windows 8 development. Twitter: @johnmont

One of the top requests from developers (reiterated at //BUILD last year) has been tools for inspecting the XAML at runtime. With Visual Studio 2015 CTP6 we’re pleased to introduce the new UI debugging tools for XAML. These tools enable you to inspect the visual tree of your running WPF application as well as the properties on any element in the tree, turning the difficult challenge of picking apart how properties override each other and figuring out winning behavior into a straightforward task that’s done at runtime, when everything is taken into account. Visual Studio integrates these UI debugging tools directly into the debugging experience so they fit seamlessly into the development cycle.

Today’s announcement brings support for WPF; we’ll release support for Windows Store apps in a future update.

Let’s take a closer look.

Meet the Live Visual Tree

The Live Visual Tree is the first of the two key pieces of the UI debugging tools:

You can use the Live Visual Tree to:

• See an “up-to-date” view of the application. As elements are added or removed from the visual tree, the Live Visual Tree updates in real time.
• Jump to the document and line of the definition with either the “Preview Source” command or in a context menu on appropriate elements when the XAML defines elements (as denoted by the source icon after many of the elements above).
• View descendant count, so you can understand complex UI structures and locate those nasty performance issues.

The Live Property Explorer

Clicking the properties button in the Live Visual Tree or selecting “Show Properties” in the context menu of any element brings up the Live Property Explorer.

The Live Property Explorer:

• Shows every property set on the currently selected elements, even property setters that are overridden elsewhere.
• Breaks properties into scopes so you can quickly see if a property is being set by the element itself, a style or elsewhere.
• Enables you to change properties and push those changes to the running application, so you can see the effect immediately.

In-App selection

Selecting elements in the Visual Tree is easy when you know the structure of the app. When you don’t know the minutia of the layout, the Live Visual Tree also provides an in-app element selection tool. When enabled, mouse events are intercepted by the UI debugging tools, allowing direct selection of any element simply by clicking on them.

The In-App selection provides two feedback modes for selecting elements:

• Basic selection mode shows a red dotted outline around the element that is about to be selected when you hover over it. Then, on a click, the Live Visual Tree selects the element, loads its properties into the Live Property Explorer and, if you enabled the Preview Source option, locates and opens the XAML for the selected element.
• Layout adorner selection mode includes additional adorners that illustrate margins and the parent to which the margins are applied.

These tools, as part of Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6, give you an early glimpse into our new XAML debugging experience, but they’re not finished yet. Here’s a few things we’re hoping to add as development continues:

• Support for Windows Store apps.
• Source code persistence -- allowing users to change properties at debug time and push those changes into the source code.

Additionally, there are some known limitations in the CTP, including the lack of CLR properties and support for editing collections, but the team is working on including these in the RTM update. If you’re interested in the specifics about how these tools work, as well as the ways we’ve extended WPF to support the UI Debugging tools, you may find this article on Expanding WPF for UI Debugging interesting.

We’d love for folks to try these tools out. Tell us what you like, what you don’t like and what you think is missing. The product team is still eager to hear your feedback and we’re grateful for any comments that folks are willing to share. If you have feedback on the UI debugging tools, you can comment here, post suggestions on UserVoice, and report bugs on the Connect site. From here, it’s all up to you.

Dante Gagne, Program Manager, Visual Studio Platform Tools Team Dante Gagne is a Program Manager with 12 years of experience with XAML. He started as one of the original testers on Expression Blend and brings his passion to XAML developers in Visual Studio. His focus is on the design experience and productivity.

One of the best parts of my job as a Product Manager in the Visual Studio team is working on events for you, our community. Last year in November I worked on one such event called Connect(); where we announced a ton of releases such as Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 preview, Visual Studio Community 2013, .NET open source and much more.

Today I am happy to announce a new series we are starting called Connect(“Live”);. With this new ongoing set of live stream sessions our goal is to give you more opportunities throughout the year to hear from, ask questions to, and engage with the product teams building the developer tools you love such as Visual Studio, .NET, Azure SDK, and many more.

Connect(“Live”); // Debugging & Cloud Diagnostics Visual Studio Team Q&A

The series begins Thursday February 26^th, streaming live from 09:30am to 10:30am PDT on Channel9. The session will be hosted by Dan Fernandez and feature members of the Visual Studio debugging and cloud diagnostics product teams. Team members will talk about what’s new for developers in Visual Studio 2015, and Azure SDK 2.5 and take your questions.

Ready to join us this Thursday? Here are the important details:

• Save the Date: You can save the date using an ICS file by clicking here
• Watch it live starting Thursday at 9:30am PDT: The live stream will be available on http://channel9.msdn.com/
• Missed the session? No problem, you’ll have a chance to see the recording that will be posted on the session page here

What’s Next?

While I hope you enjoy this first session, we have already started planning the next few Connect(“Live”); topics and will announce them using this blog, in our @visualstudio Twitter feed, and post them on the Connect(“Live”) Channel9 page.

We’d also love to hear what teams or topics you want in future sessions, and we'll do our best to make it happen. To give the feedback, you can post your comments here or contact me directly using Twitter @lyalindotcom

Thank you for reading.

Dmitry Lyalin, Sr. Product Manager for Visual Studio (@lyalindotcom) Dmitry has been at Microsoft for over 6 years, working first in Microsoft Consulting and Premier Support out of NYC before joining the Visual Studio Team and moving to Redmond, WA. In his spare time he loves to tinker with code, create apps, and is an avid PC gamer.

As a step on the path of enabling software for all audiences and abilities, we’re happy to share a new Visual Studio extension that leverages Tenon’s HTML accessibility checker service. With this extension, we’ve made it easier for developers to detect and resolve common HTML-based user interface accessibility issues.

Unlike some other web-based accessibility checking services, Tenon’s service has a public API and is designed to be integrated with extensible tools like Visual Studio. We’d love for you to try it out by installing the extension Tenon HTML Accessibility Checker from the Visual Studio Gallery or from within Visual Studio.

(Note: We will publish the source code for the extension on GitHub in about a month so that you can improve upon or evolve the extension to support other accessibility checker services.)

Now, let’s go over this new extension in a little more detail.

Adding the Tenon HTML Accessibility Checker to Visual Studio

To get started, open a supported version of Visual Studio such as VS 2013, 2015 Preview or the free Visual Studio Community. Select the Tools menu, and then the Extensions and Updates option. Search for “accessibility” and select Install the Tenon HTML Accessibility Checker. Restart Visual Studio when prompted.

How to check your static HTML for common accessibility issues

First, register for a free key, which you will need later. (It only takes a few minutes.) Once you have installed the extension and registered for a key, open your project and right-click on any of the following code asset files in your solution (from Solution Explorer): *.htm, *.html, *.cshtml, *.xhtml, *.ascx, *.asp, or *.aspx file.

Solution Explorer with right click option on an *.html file

Select the Check Accessibility with Tenon option from the context menu to evaluate the content of the file. Enter your registration key, select the desired evaluation level, and indicate whether you want to see Errors and Warnings or only Errors in the results. Evaluation levels range from level A, which is the most conservative evaluation, through levels AA and AAA, which are broader evaluations. Choosing to display only Errors will minimize false positives but may omit valid warnings.

Tenon HTML Accessibility Checker pop-up window

Click Validate on the Tenon HTML Accessibility Checker pop-up window to evaluate the static HTML. The results are written to the Error List within Visual Studio, under the Errors and Warnings tabs as appropriate. The description of each issue includes a brief description, and a link to Tenon’s best practices, which include instructions on how to address the issue. You can see what WCAG Success Criterion are tested by Tenon on its What Tenon Tests page.

Error List with sample errors

Check your dynamic HTML too

In addition to HTML within a file, you can send the rendered content of dynamic pages to Tenon for evaluation. From the Solution Explorer, select the Project, then right-click and choose Debug > Start new instance. Your preferred browser will launch with the default page and the Tenon HTML Accessibility Checker pop-up window will be displayed. At this point, evaluate the default page, or navigate to another page and evaluate it by clicking Validate on the Tenon HTML Accessibility Checker pop up window.

This is the preferred approach, since rendered pages represent what an actual user would experience. For example, any dynamically rendered HTML or JavaScript will be included in this evaluation.

Note: You can disable the Tenon HTML Accessibility Checker pop up window by unchecking the Enable Tenon Browser Extension option on the Browser Link drop down menu.

Browser Link menu

Finally, it is worth noting that static html files cannot be evaluated in the debug mode unless you take some additional steps. You must add code to your web.config file as seen here: Using Browser Link in Visual Studio.

Add the Tenon HTML Accessibility Checker to IE

In addition to checking HTML accessibility using the Tenon service from within Visual Studio, you can use a simple Internet Explorer add-on to check published web pages for common accessibility issues.

To install the add-on, go to http://www.iegallery.com, click on the Add-ons tab, choose the Tenon Accessibility Checker and click Add to Internet Explorer. Once the add-on is installed, you can send a URL to the Tenon service by right-clicking a page and choosing the Check Accessibility with Tenon option.

Tenon Checker right click option from within IE

(Note: this option is only available for http:// pages; https:// is not supported.)

The Internet Explorer add-on does not require a free key, and is a good way to quickly check for common issues.

Help the community improve or re-implement the Visual Studio extension

We envision several new features for the Visual Studio extension, such as code highlights in each source file that is associated with a particular Error or Warning. Similarly, other accessibility checkers could implement this design pattern to make it easier for developers to create accessible apps--by incorporating their checks early in the software development lifecycle (in addition to checking solutions that are in production).

Please review and comment, update, or even re-implement this extension once the source code is published on GitHub.

Thanks

Special thanks to Karl Groves at Tenon. Karl has been working in accessibility for years and is already known to many people in the accessibility community. Karl continues to be a strong advocate for giving developers tools to make it easier to create accessible software. And he is a Viking. (Really.)

And, thanks for providing feedback by rating this article, sharing the article on social media and/or by adding a comment below.

Jeff Petty, Program Manager, Operating System Group (OSG) Accessibility Team Jeff has been at Microsoft for about a year. He is helping to envision and realize the promise of more people centric computing. Currently, he is focused on making it easier for developers to create accessible solutions with Microsoft technology and teaching his daughter how to ski :-)

The Visual Studio team takes great effort to ensure that our developer community is engaged and informed through various social networks, including channels on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. and as part of the process we gain insights into what you enjoy through your retweets, Facebook likes and shares, and other public opinions of our features and content.

Your participation and feedback is essential, as it lets us see what stories you care about. To share our own understanding of your interests, I post a daily “Top 10 Most Active Stories” article over on my blog at lyalin.com.

This month we’ve decided to take it one step further and go beyond just the daily data. I’ve reviewed a full month of activity for February 2015 and am posting here the top eleven most active blog posts that were trending. I hope you find this list useful and interesting; and of course we welcome your feedback.

Top Trending Blogs for February 2015

.NET CoreCLR is now Open Source. Furthering the .NET open source story, our .NET team blogs that CoreCLR is now Open Source, where they announce the availability of CoreCLR on GitHub. This post also includes a Channel9 chat with the .NET Core team where they discuss CoreCLR and CoreCLR repo, and provides a Console App walkthrough that developers can follow to build .NET console apps.

Scott Hanselman Analyzes .NET CoreCLR repo on GitHub using Power BI. Scott Hanselman covers .NET Core open source in his blog post The .NET CoreCLR is now open source, so I ran the GitHub repo through Azure Power BI , where he shares some interesting data. He shows how anyone can use Microsoft Power BI to pull in a GitHub repo, perform BI analytics, and gain insights into several aspects of a project such as who contributes how much to a project, issues found and closed, and others.

.NET Open Source Update. Immo Landwerth from the .NET team blogs on .NET Core Open Source Update, where he shares his view on just how great of an experience Open Source projects have been for him and the team. He talks about why we have open sourced .NET Core, and all the collaborative goodness you can use with Code and API reviews.

Scott Guthrie Introduces ASP.NET 5. A cloud-optimized, lean, and cross-platform open source web framework “ASP.NET 5” was made available in Feb 2015. Scott Guthrie blogs on Introducing ASP.NET 5, where he goes into the details of each change to ASP.NET. He provides screenshots and code snippets to share the various architectural improvements we have made with this release for example to provide a streamlined development experience we make use of dynamic compilation so you no longer have to compile your application every time you make a change. You simply (1) edit the code, (2) save your changes, (3) refresh the browser, (4) see your changes appear automatically.

Understanding .NET 2015. As part of a blog series focused on line of business applications, Beth Massi posted Understanding .NET 2015 in which she walks readers through a high-level overview of recent .NET innovations and the continued voyage into open source. A lot has happened since we released .NET 2015 at the Connect(); event, and this blog post will get you caught up.

Free Azure ebook on Fundamentals. The MS Press blog posted on a recently released free ebook: Microsoft Azure Essentials - Fundamentals of Azure. This book covers the fundamentals of Microsoft Azure and shares walkthroughs and examples to help you get started right away. It also discusses common tools useful when creating or managing Azure-based solutions, so it’s a great asset to check out.

Free O’Reilly report on Data Science in the cloud. The Microsoft Machine Learning blog posts on a free O'Reilly report on Data Science in the Cloud which shows how developers can use cloud-based tools with existing techniques like R to design Machine Learning models. The report uses practical data science examples, with relevant data sets and R scripts available on GitHub to make it easy to consume.

AngularJS in Visual Studio. The Visual Studio team blogs on Using AngularJS in Visual Studio. In this post they talk about how an extension to Visual Studio built by John Bledsoe (in collaboration with Jordan Matthiesen) helps with existing issues for developers working with AngularJS. This post also shares code snippets and details on the various features you can use to make your life easier.

Babylon.js 2.0. David Catuhe blogs on What’s new in Babylon.js v2.0. He showcases some amazing audio visual demos, special effects, and performance improvements in this release. For those that don’t know what Bablyon.js is, it’s a 3D engine based on WebGL and JavaScript, which gives developers some interesting opportunities to build 3D renderings or games that work with many modern browsers, certainly worth checking out.

Scott Hanselman on how JavaScript has won. Scott Hanselman blogs on JavaScript Has Won: Run Flash with Mozilla Shumway and Develop Silverlight in JS with Fayde. It’s an interesting post that highlights how JavaScript can be used to run Flash and Silverlight apps without Flash and Silverlight. Don’t take my word for it! Check out the post for the how and why of it.

Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 & Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP. Last but definitely not least, many of you were excited to see our blog post on the release of Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 and Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP release. In this blog post, John Montgomery covers highlights from both of these releases with additional links to posts, articles and docs that talk about each topic in details. Check out this post and download the bits to get started testing the newest release.

Feedback

I hope you enjoy this list. I will bring you a new one each month, so stay tuned and please don’t hesitate to send me feedback using Twitter or by commenting below.

Thank you for reading.

Dmitry Lyalin, Sr. Product Manager for Visual Studio (@lyalindotcom) Dmitry has been at Microsoft for over 6 years, working first in Microsoft Consulting and Premier Support out of NYC before joining the Visual Studio Team and moving to Redmond, WA. In his spare time he loves to tinker with code, create apps, and is an avid PC gamer.

Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 CTP 3 released today, primarily focuses on bug fixes. The release notes and knowledge base article have the complete list of features and fixes.

As always, please give us your feedback, suggestions, thoughts, and ideas on our UserVoice site, through the in-product Send-a-Smile and Send-a-Frown UI, or file a bug through the Visual Studio Connect site.

Thanks!

John

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management, Visual Studio Platform John has been at Microsoft for 15 years, working in developer technologies the whole time. Most recently before working on the Visual Studio core development environment, he was working on the tools for Windows 8 development. Twitter: @johnmont

For those of you running Visual Studio 2013, yesterday we released Tools for Apache Cordova CTP 3.1. This release contains a large number of performance and reliability improvements (many of which you’ve reported) along with support for Windows Phone 8.1 debugging.

Note:
If you use Visual Studio 2015 and have CTP6 installed, you already have all of these improvements! The CTP6 blog post summarizes more concisely the Tools for Apache Cordova improvements this post expands on.

Windows Phone 8.1 Debugging Support

With our Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova releases, our goal has been to provide you with a great set of tools for building Android, iOS, and Windows apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. A large part of this revolves around helping you debug your code. With this release (and CTP6 for Visual Studio 2015), you can now debug your Apache Cordova apps that target Windows Phone 8.1.

The following video gives you a quick overview of this functionality:

Our debugging support for Windows Phone 8.1 joins with the other family of platforms you can already debug to, such as Android 4.4, Android 4.0+ or 2.3 with jsHybugger, iOS 6+, Windows Phone 8, Windows Store 8, and Windows Store 8.1. Across all of these platforms, you can set breakpoints, inspect variables, use the console, and perform all the various other debugging tasks to help you find issues quickly.

Other Improvements and Fixes

Besides expanding our debugging support to include Windows Phone 8.1 emulators and devices, we’ve made dozens of bug fixes in the few months since our last release. Some of our notable changes include:

• Updating to Cordova 4.1.2. With CTP3.1, you can create projects targeting the latest version of Cordova - version 4.1.2. This new version includes, among other things, better support for iOS and Windows Phone 8. You can read about the full list of changes on the Apache Cordova blog.
• Performance Improvements.Late last year, we outlined our plans to improve the performance to make common tasks faster. This time around, we focused on improving how long it takes for you to work with plug-ins. For example, the time for adding a local plug-in in our earlier CTP3 was around 2 minutes. In this release, we reduced the time to under 3 seconds!
• Addressing our Packaging and Build Functionality. Building and deploying projects across all platforms should be more reliable with this release. We addressed issues that prevented building when you switched from one platform to another, and we made another round of certificate updates to ensure building for Windows platforms works more reliably.
• Improving our Ripple Support. For many of you, Ripple is a popular alternative to an emulator or device for testing your app’s functionality and simulating device capabilities. In this release, we addressed some of your top concerns such as debugging Ripple while the Android emulator is running, connecting to Ripple when VS is running in Admin mode, Office 365 sign-in issues, and other reliability problems.

Like we’ve mentioned in the past, if you’ve already installed the tools and are actively using it, thank you! The improvements and bug fixes we prioritize are based largely on your feedback, so please don’t feel shy in contacting us via UserVoice, Twitter, and StackOverflow.

Cheers,

Kirupa

Kirupa Chinnathambi, Program Manager, Visual Studio Client Team Kirupa Chinnathambi is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio team where he spends a lot of time thinking about (and occasionally working on) how to improve the HTML developer experience. When he isn’t busy writing about himself in third person, he can be found on twitter (@kirupa), Facebook, and on kirupa.com.

Last week, at ng-conf, the Angular team at Google provided the web developer world with an update on the state of Angular 2. They were joined on stage by a member of the TypeScript team, Jonathan Turner, to also announce that Angular 2 will be built using TypeScript. Jonathan then demoed a preview of the upcoming TypeScript 1.5 release via an Angular 2 sample application.

This post will walk you through the Visual Studio editor support for the new language features in TypeScript as well as Angular 2.

Opening the Angular 2 demo project in Visual Studio

At the time I’m writing this blog post, there isn’t an official preview version of Angular with TypeScript that you can download via NuGet to use in your projects. To help you experiment with the tooling experience in Visual Studio, we’ve built a demo project with TypeScript 1.5 and Angular 2 that you can download and use today.

You can use either Visual Studio 2013 or Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 to explore the demo. To get started:

• For Visual Studio 2013, you’ll to need install TypeScript 1.4 support. If you already have the Visual Studio 2015 CTP, proceed to step 2.
• Clone the ngconf2015demo repository from GitHub. I’m placing it in my local c:\src folder. From a command prompt:

C:\> cd src

C:\src> git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/ngconf2015demo.git

• Follow the instructions from the project site to update Visual Studio with support for TypeScript 1.5. I’m going to use Visual Studio 2015 for this post, so I’ll follow the directions to update for that version.
• Open the demo project in Visual Studio. You can use the File | Open | Web Site… menu and open the c:\src\ngconf2015demo\ folder cloned from GitHub. Here’s how the solution explorer appears in Visual Studio after doing this:

Because this demo uses pre-release features of the TypeScript compiler, it’s using a custom version of the compiler that is copied into the tsc folder of this project. This means you can’t easily build and run this project from Visual Studio (we’re working on fixing this by the time TypeScript 1.5 is released.) For now, you can explore the editor support in Visual Studio and use the command line to build and preview the project following the directions on the ngconf2015demo project site.

Editing an Angular 2 application with TypeScript 1.5

Now that we’re all set up, let’s look at how Visual Studio and the new language features in TypeScript 1.5 will help you build apps using Angular 2.

Referencing Angular modules

When building an Angular 2 app, you’ll start by importing core Angular modules for use in the app. You can see an example of this in the todo.ts file provided in the TodoMVC sample:

import {Component, Template} from 'annotations';
import {bootstrap, Foreach} from 'angular2/angular2';

As this is pre-release code, the imports are likely to change in the final version of Angular 2. The important thing to note is that the import code you see here is written using the module syntax for the next version of the JavaScript language, ECMAScript 6 (also known as ES6). TypeScript 1.5 provides full support for ES6 modules.

You’ll see that we’re importing an Angular Component annotation, which is an important concept in Angular 2 apps (more about Components in a moment). In this case, you may be interested in understanding what the Component annotation looks like, Visual Studio’s code navigation features can help here. For example, if you right-click on Component and choose “Peek Definition”:

You’ll see the following:

If you’d rather open up the full file where this annotation is defined, you can also use “Go to Definition” on the module import statement and Visual Studio will open the file that contains it:

Defining Components

In Angular 2, applications are based upon components, which structure and represent the UI. You can see in our sample ToDo MVC project, in todo.ts, where the main TodoApp component is defined.

Annotations are a new feature in TypeScript 1.5 that will let you attach additional data to classes, such as configuration metadata. This is also a language feature being discussed for the JavaScript language as part of the ECMAScript 7 specification process. Angular 2 with TypeScript leverages annotations heavily in its developer experience.

A component is a class decorated with an @Component annotation, which identifies to Angular that your class represents an Angular Component. In Visual Studio, when you’re authoring a component, IntelliSense understands annotations and can suggest valid configuration parameters for them:

In this example, I’ve invoked IntelliSense by using the Ctrl+J keyboard sequence inside of the call to @Component. Here’s an example of a class with the @Component annotation fully defined:

@Component({
    selector: 'todo-app',
    componentServices: []
})
class TodoApp { 
}

As you can see, the TodoApp component is configured and bound to a ‘todo-app’ element on the HTML page (index.html) for the app.

Finding Components used in an application

One of the benefits of annotations is that they make it easier for tools to understand your source code. As an example, it’s now easy to find where Components are used throughout your project. In Visual Studio, you can use the “Find All References” feature for an annotation to find all source code that uses that annotation:

And a list of all sources using the @Component annotation is then shown:

Working with Dependencies

Dependency management has always been a core part of Angular, with dependency injection built-in. When using TypeScript with Angular 2, you specify dependencies between your classes simply by referencing Types. For example, the TodoApp class below depends upon an AngularFire class as part of the @Component annotation and in its constructor. When the app runs, Angular will ensure that an instance of the AngularFire type is created correctly and passed to the class constructor:

@Component({
    selector: 'todo-app',
    componentServices: [
      AngularFire
    ]})   
class TodoApp {
    todoService: FirebaseArray;
    todoEdit: any;

    constructor(sync: AngularFire) {
        this.todoService = sync.asArray();
        this.todoEdit = null;
    }
}

And, since you’re using types to define dependencies, you can take advantage of the tooling benefits provided by a typed language like TypeScript and use refactoring tools with high confidence. For example, if you want to rename the AngularFire class in this example, you can use the “Rename” option in VS to change its name throughout the full project:

Visual Studio will then find and replace references for you, throughout all the files in your project:

Using Angular 2 with JavaScript

In this post, I’ve given you a glimpse at how Visual Studio and TypeScript 1.5 will be able to help you when building Angular 2 application. You can also build Angular 2 apps using plain old ES5 or the upcoming ES6 version JavaScript. When developing an Angular 2 app using JavaScript in Visual Studio, you’ll get all the features of the JavaScript editor, including IntelliSense, Go to Definition, and the navigation bar. As Angular 2 solidifies, we’ll continue to build new editor features in Visual Studio for Angular developers.

Looking forward to the release of Angular 2

Angular 2 is considered an “Alpha Preview” at the time of this writing, and we’ll continue to work with the Angular team as it reaches full release quality. We want to continue to build a great experience in Visual Studio not just for TypeScript developers, but web developers in general who are working with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

Try it out and share your feedback

You can start experimenting with Angular 2 today, following the tutorial on the Angular website http://www.angular.io, but be aware that the documentation doesn’t refer to the upcoming TypeScript workflow just yet. To see a preview of Angular 2 working with TypeScript 1.5, check out the demo site at http://www.github.com/microsoft/ngconf2015demo. We’d love to hear any feedback you have.

Finally, if you want to learn more about TypeScript, install the latest TypeScript tools for Visual Studio 2013 (also included as part of Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6) and check out the TypeScript website for documentation and samples.

Jordan Matthiesen - Program Manager, Visual Studio JavaScript tools team (@JMatthiesen) Jordan has been at Microsoft for 3 years, working on JavaScript tooling for client application developers. Prior to this, he worked for 14 years developing web applications and products using ASP.NET/C#, HTML, CSS, and lots and lots of JavaScript.

It’s been a while since we released Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.1 (PTVS), and in that time the team has been working on Azure Machine Learning and the Python Client library. But we haven’t forgotten about PTVS. We’ve been working on some of the most popular requests from users, and today we are releasing the beta of PTVS 2.2 for Visual Studio 2013 (including free options Visual Studio Community Edition, Express for Web and Express for Desktop) and Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6.

PTVS 2.2 Beta has a number of new features that our users have been asking for, as well as plenty of fixes for some really annoying issues (the complete list is here). It's not quite ready for production use yet, but we'd very much like to hear feedback on how it's looking and to make sure that we’re making a tool that you'll love to use. Here are some of the highlights of the new release.

Task Comments

If you’re anything like us, you probably have little notes scattered throughout your code: things that you need to do later, things that you hope someone else will do later, and things that you know you probably shouldn’t have done. Our users have long been asking to see these all listed in the Task List window, and in PTVS 2.2 Beta you now can. The Task List window can be found in the View menu, and we’ll show the full list when Comments is selected in the drop down.

Python Environments window

Working with multiple versions of Python is important to our users, and nearly everyone wants to find and install the latest and greatest Python libraries. We've given the Python Environments a face-lift and added some new functionality. You can now easily view and configure all of your Python installations, open the Interactive Window, search PyPI for packages and install them, update packages you've already installed, and get more information about why IntelliSense isn't working for some libraries (sorry). We like it in the new tall layout, but if you make the window wide enough it will snap into a horizontal layout. Let us know which one you prefer and what other functionality you’d like to see here. You can open the Python Environments window through View, Other Windows.

Collapsible everything

This has probably been our most popular request ever, and so we've added it. Now you can collapse almost anything that spans multiple lines, no matter where they are in your code. This includes functions, classes, lists, dictionaries, loops, exception handlers, and even multi-line strings. We’ll also detect #region and #endregion (which are normally just treated like comments in Python) and you can collapse everything in between. If you find something we missed that you’d like to be able to collapse, let us know.

Code Snippets

You’ll often find yourself writing the same few lines of code over and over again, and so we've added Code Snippets to make this easier. You can insert any of the predefined Python snippets though the Edit, IntelliSense menus, or simply by typing a keyword like “def”, “try” or “class” and pressing Tab. You can also add your own code snippets for the things you need, and if you’d like to see them included in PTVS then you can share them with us on CodePlex.

Autos Window

It’s hard to beat a good debugger (and as many long-suffering Python developers will tell you, Visual Studio is a great debugger), and ours is getting better in PTVS 2.2. Along with support for breakpoint hit counts, we’ve also enabled the Autos window. Now, while you’re debugging, the Autos window will show you the values of variables and simple expressions near the current line. Every time you step, it will update with new values or new variables that are now nearby, so you don’t have to keep hovering the mouse or updating your Watch window.

Summary

These features and many more are available in PTVS 2.2 Beta, as well as lots of bug fixes and performance improvements. This is a preview release, so we recommend using it in a test environment. Feel free to give us feedback. We are active on CodePlex and also look at Visual Studio’s feedback tool. We appreciate all the feedback we’ve received on previous releases, and we'd really like to hear from our users.

You can download PTVS 2.2 Beta and our sample project packs from our CodePlex page. And like all of Microsoft’s other Python projects, PTVS is open-source and you’re welcome to contribute features, bug fixes, docs, or just feedback and suggestions.

Steve Dower, Software Engineer, Python Tools Steve is an engineer who tells people about Python and then gives them excuses to use it and great tools to use it with. He works on Python Tools for Visual Studio, contributes to many of Microsoft’s Python libraries, and is a core contributor and Windows expert for CPython.

dotnetConf is a free, live web event featuring speakers from Microsoft product teams and the .NET community at-large. Together, across two content-packed days, we’ll cover .NET 2015, ASP.NET 5, .NET open source, and cool community presentations – including several from our MVPs, Xamarin partners, and internal Microsoft teams.

For the complete list see: dotnetConf 2015 agenda

Join our Live Q&A

dotnetConf is about you, the .NET developer, and what’s on your mind! We want you to participate in the discussion by joining the live Q&A on Channel 9 Live, where you can submit your questions to our .NET experts. You can also follow us on Twitter and use the #dotnetconf tag to continue the dialog.

New to dotnetConf?

Get started by reading this dotnetConf 2015 post on the .NET blog. You can also view recordings of dotnetConf 2014 available on Channel 9 for last year’s topics and presentations.

See you there!

Dmitry Lyalin, Sr. Product Manager for Visual Studio Follow me on Twitter, @lyalindotcom Dmitry has been at Microsoft for over 7 years, working first in Microsoft Consulting and Premier Support out of NYC before joining the Visual Studio Team and moving to Redmond, WA. In his spare time he loves to tinker with code, create apps, and is an avid PC gamer.

It’s been a busy week for the .NET teams here at Microsoft. We’ve just concluded our two day, live, free, dotnetConf 2015 event, with 19 sessions from both our product teams and community presenters. If you missed it, don’t worry. You can watch all the videos on-demand over at the dotnetConf 2015 Channel 9 page.

Next Week – WPF Team Live Q&A Connect(“Live”);

We are not done yet. On Monday, March 23^rd we are once again back with another Connect(“Live”); session, this time featuring the WPF team.

This will be your next opportunity to engage the team, ask your questions, and hear about the future of the framework. Among other topics, we’ll take another look at the newly revealed WPF App Local technology that is being considered for future releases and other investigations into platform improvements.

Details:

When: Monday 3/23 at 11:00am PDT
Speakers: Harikrishna Menon Ajith Kumar, Unni Ravindranathan, Rob Relyea and hosted by Seth Juarez

• Save the Date: You can save the date using an ICS file
• Watch it live:Connect (“Live”); event page
• Missed the live broadcast? No problem, see the WPF Team Live Q&A session page for the video

We hope to see you there!

Dmitry Lyalin, Sr. Product Manager for Visual Studio (@lyalindotcom) Dmitry has been at Microsoft for over 7 years, working first in Microsoft Consulting and Premier Support out of NYC before joining the Visual Studio Team and moving to Redmond, WA. In his spare time he loves to tinker with code, create apps, and is an avid PC gamer.

Today we announced the Visual Studio 2015 Tools for Windows 10 Preview. These tools enable you to build Windows universal apps that run across all Windows 10 devices from Windows Phone to Xbox and Windows Store. In addition, you can also use these tools to build desktop Win32 apps that leverage Windows 10 APIs. You can read more in this blog post by Soma or on the building Windows apps blog post.

Become a Windows Insider today to download these tools and use them with Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6. We expect many changes between now and the final version so don’t use these tools to build applications for production scenarios.

As always, we look forward to your feedback on this technical preview. You can share your feedback via the Visual Studio Connect site, Send-a-Smile or on the Windows Insider forums.

Unni Ravindranathan, Program Manager, Visual Studio Unni Ravindranathan has been working for the Visual Studio team for the past 11 years, and currently leads the effort for building tools for Windows 10.

With the Azure SDK 2.5.1 Release we took the opportunity to combine existing Web Publishing techniques with the new Azure Resource Management APIs to support Azure’s newest feature for Web, Mobile, and API developers – Azure App Service. We’ve added Azure API Apps as a publishing target for the ASP.NET developer, so you can make use of concepts like Resource Groups and App Hosting Plans in the new Azure portal, right within Visual Studio.

Enable Developers with One-click Strongly-typed REST API Clients

For developers who consistently need to consume REST APIs from various vendors or services, a component of the Azure App Service – Azure API Apps– exposes metadata formats like Swagger and WADL to describe REST API endpoints. Included is a new Azure API App template that provides dynamic Swagger generation from ASP.NET Web API controllers. Additionally, there is a new consumption system in Visual Studio that provides one-click C# code generation features to make it easier than ever to consume REST APIs without needing to write repetitive HTTP calls or JSON or XML parsing. The generated client code is also supported in Portable Class Library projects, so you can use them from any platform supporting PCL, like Windows Phone 8.1 and Universal apps, as well as apps written targeting Android and iOS with Xamarin. Read more about the Azure App Service on the Microsoft blog announcing the availability of Azure App Services and Azure blog announcing Azure App Service. You can also watch recording of the webcast announcement to learn more.

Access to a Rich Marketplace of Third-party APIs

The Azure Marketplace now contains dozens of APIs for existing Microsoft services and products, and includes other APIs from partners such as Twilio, Salesforce, and Dropbox. The REST API consumption features available for custom APIs are also available for APIs installed via the Azure Management Portal’s interface, so you’ll be able to access strongly-typed clients for any of the APIs in the rapidly-growing Azure marketplace.

End-to-end Experience of Developing, Deploying, and Consuming an Azure API App

Now let’s walk-through the new Azure API Apps tools. To start, we'll create a new Azure API App using the new project templates available in the 2.5.1 release. Then, we'll deploy that Azure API App to the cloud. Once it's deployed we'll create a simple client application that will consume the deployed API App using the strongly-typed auto-generated client code.

Getting Started: the Azure API App Template

Create a new Web Application project using Visual Studio 2013 named TodoListApi.

When the One ASP.NET dialog opens, select the Azure API Apps template. The Azure API Apps template is a bare-bones Web API project, including the Azure API Apps SDK NuGet and the Swashbuckle NuGet package, which provides support for dynamic Swagger generation for Web API controllers.

Note the project readme for the API Apps template. It includes helpful links to documentation articles which will describe in greater detail how to write, deploy, debug, and consume Azure API Apps.

Add a custom model and controller that makes use of that model. The screenshot below demonstrates the project’s structure after adding a TodoItem model and TodoController class.

Next, create a new Azure API App in your Azure subscription by using the right-click > Publish feature for Web Projects.

Select the new Microsoft Azure API Apps (Preview) publish target.

The Azure API Apps publishing dialog will open. Click the New button to create a new Azure API App in your Azure subscription.

The Azure API App creation dialog will open. Now, select an existing App Service Plan and Resource Group into which your API App will be deployed. For the purpose of this demonstration, create a new App Service Plan and Resource Group using the convenient options in the dialog.

Once you click OK, the Azure API App provisioning begins. This process can take 1-2 minutes, so you will receive a warning that the provisioning process will complete. Once it completes, execute the publish action once more to publish your code to the API App instance.

The Azure App Service Activity window will reflect the process of creating the new Azure API App in your subscription. You’ll be notified when the creation process has completed.

Once the creation process completes, execute the right-click > Publish gesture on the API App project, and see that the publish settings file is resident and that the code is ready to be published to Azure.

Note: You must execute the publish process twice to ensure your code was published to the newly-provisioned site. The first publish process creates the Azure API App resources in your subscription but does not publish the code once the creation has completed, so you need to execute Publish a second time to deploy your code.

Once you click the Publish button, the API App code will be deployed to your running Azure API App instance.

Viewing the Azure API App Definition in the Azure Management Portal

Following deployment, you can open up the Azure Management Portal in your web browser and navigate to the API App you just deployed. By clicking on the API Definition button in the portal blade for the API App you'll see the REST API endpoints for your Web API TodoController and for the default ValuesController (unless you deleted the ValuesController.cs file from the project).

Now that the Azure API App has been deployed, we'll consume it from a Windows Desktop Console application.

One-click API App Client Code Generation in Visual Studio

API App consumption is available for most C# project types, and more will be added in future releases. For the purpose of this demo, we'll just roll a simple Console application to call the Azure API App to verify it can be consumed. To get started consuming the API add a new project to your solution in Visual Studio.

Next, select the Console Application project template from the dialog and name the project TodoListApiClient.

Once the project is loaded in Visual Studio, right-click the project node and select the Add > Azure API App Client context menu item to open up the Azure API Apps Client generation dialog. Once it opens, select the radio button labeled Download from Microsoft Azure API App and select the TodoListApi API App you just published to Azure. Then, click the OK button. Note, you can also provide a custom namespace for the API App client code if you'd like, but the default namespace is equivalent to the base namespace of your Console Application project.

Once you click the OK button, Visual Studio will pull down the Swagger metadata exposed by your Azure API App and generate client code to make it easier for your Console Application to call your Azure API App endpoints. Once the Azure API App client code is generated, you will see it added to the Console Application project.

Now, open up the Program.cs file in the Console Application project. The generated code makes it easier than ever to use strongly-typed classes and methods to call your Azure API endpoints. The code below will reach out to the API and call its Get method, which returns the list of TodoItems from the API.

Once you hit F5 to launch the Console Application in the Visual Studio debugger, it will call the Azure API running live in the cloud, pull down the list of TodoItems, and display them in the Console window.

It's never been easier to develop, deploy, and consume data presented via REST APIs. Download the Azure SDK for Visual Studio to try the new tooling for Azure API Apps.

Get in Touch!

Community feedback is imperative to the success of the Visual Studio Web Tools Extensions, and we value your feedback. Feedback is welcome via Send-a-Smile and Send-a-Frown UI within Visual Studio, or you can file a bug through the Visual Studio Connect site. If you have ideas on how to enhance the functionality of the Azure API Apps tools we’ve introduced, please share them on the Visual Studio UserVoice or ASP.NET UserVoice sites. The Azure API Apps resource and tools are in preview as of the 2.5.1 release. We have more to come and welcome your feedback during the preview period. Also, please check the Azure SDK for .NET Release Notes for a full list of features and known issues.

Brady Gaster, Program Manager, Web Tools Extensions Team Brady Gaster helps create tools and SDKs to make it easier for developers to party in the cloud, like Azure Tools in the Web Tools Extensions for Visual Studio, the Azure Management Libraries for .NET, and the Azure Management Libraries for Java. He likes to talk about his favorite technologies - Azure, ASP.NET, Web API, SignalR in sessions and on his blog. You can find Brady on Twitter at @bradygaster when he's not tinkering with the ASP.NET stack, Azure, devices running the .NET Micro Framework, or making music in his basement.

Node.js Tools 1.0 for Visual Studio (NTVS) is now available for download! NTVS is a free, open source extension for Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013 that turns Visual Studio into a Node.js IDE. NTVS 1.0 supports the free Visual Studio Community and Visual Studio Express for Web editions, as well as Visual Studio Professional and higher.

Node.js is a platform for building fast, scalable applications using JavaScript. It’s making its way just about everywhere – from servers, to Internet of Things devices, to desktop applications, to who knows what next? And now, with Node.js support in Visual Studio, it’s easier than ever before to develop Node.js applications.

Node.js, meet Visual Studio

We’ve had NTVS under development for well over a year now. Some highlights of this release include:

• Rich editing experiences
• Code completions (IntelliSense)
• Interactive window (REPL)
• npm integration
• Advanced debugging and profiling
• Test explorer integration
• Full integration with some other Visual Studio features
• Node.js, io.js, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, and JSON support.

Editing and IntelliSense

NTVS supports syntax highlighting, code-folding (i.e., brace-completion, automatic formatting, go-to-definition (F12), find in files, code completions, everything you would expect to be there is there.

Code completions? For a dynamically typed language? Yep, you heard us right. NTVS will statically analyze your project to provide you with syntactically-correct code completions for your Node.js code and packages.

Interactive Window (REPL)

For the uninitiated, REPLs are awesome. Write some code, and see the results inline. It really speeds up the process of experimenting with code, or exploring a new package. And of course, we've gone a step further and sprinkled the experience with some Visual Studio magic - you'll get full syntax highlighting and completions, just like you do in theeditor.

npm Integration

Explore and manage your npm dependencies in Solution Explorer, search for and install dependencies from the npm registry in the rich UI, and hop into the interactive window or command prompt for everything else. The end-to-end npm integration makes working with your dependencies easy – NTVS will even warn you when one of your dependencies is missing.

Advanced debugging and profiling

We’re always shocked to hear how many people are relying on print-line statements to debug their Node.js code. With NTVS, you can enjoy stepping through your code with breakpoints and automatic exception notifications. Advanced features include conditional breakpoints, tracepoints, hit counts, and edit-and-continue.

But a lot of my issues occur on my production server! What if I’m not deploying to Windows? Or Azure?

Sad times for the Windows/Azure teams… That’s okay, though, because NTVS has you covered with remote debugging to any OS (Windows/Linux/MacOS).

Oh no! My code! It’s so slow! What ever shall I do?

NTVS takes advantage of V8 profiling API’s and Visual Studio’s reporting features to give you a sense of where your program is spending its time so you can quickly track down performance issues.

Unit Testing

Integration with Visual Studio’s test explorer means that you can author, run, debug, and filter unit tests without having to switch to a command prompt. Use mocha, or simply extend Visual Studio to work with your favorite unit testing framework.

And much more…

But wait, there's more! Here's a quick pass through the remaining features:

• Project templates to get you up and running in an instant.
• TypeScript lovers, rejoice – all the awesome features we’ve described apply to TypeScript as well.
• Git/TFS integration – no command-line required.
• Azure Integration – create and deploy a web application in < 5 minutes.

Also be sure to check out these popular Visual Studio extensions that complement NTVS:

• TypeScript for Visual Studio
• Package IntelliSense
• Web Essentials (includes jslint and jshint)
• Task Runner Explorer (for grunt and gulp)

Get Started with Node.js Tools for Visual Studio

Download Node.js Tools for Visual Studio to get started developing Node.js applications in Visual Studio. And when you're ready to deploy and monitor your application, you can take advantage of our full support for Node.js in Azure and Azure services. Together, Visual Studio and Azure provide you with an amazing experience throughout the entire development lifecycle.

Questions, compliments, complaints?

NTVS is a free and open-source project that’s been developed with the help of the community from the start. File an issue, request a feature, post in our forums, or send us a carrier pigeon– your pick. We’d love to hear your feedback, especially if it comes in the form of a pull request. :-)

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the incredible people who have already contributed. We should all be proud of the product we’ve built together.

And this is only the beginning. Onwards!

Sara Itani (@mousetraps), Software Engineer, Node.js Tools for Visual Studio Sara is a developer on Node.js Tools for Visual Studio. At first, she was skeptical about Node.js – that is, until she realized its full potential… Now, she’s all in, and excited to help it take over the world by bringing the power of Visual Studio to the Node.js community. She, for one, welcomes our new JavaScript overlords. :-)

If you use the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, you know that our long-time Visual Studio partner DevExpressmaintains it, and that it’s free and open-source. Recently they released an updated and improved ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. You can download this new version here: devexpress.com/act

In a short time that they have taken over the project, they have fixed the most glaring issues along with a number of other changes to make the Toolkit a solid library to have in your ASP.NET application.

What's New

The new release includes:

• Stable and working controls. We addressed multiple major tracked bugs to ensure a more stable Control Toolkit.
• Modern browser support. Previous versions of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit did not work well in all browsers. With this release the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit works with all popular HTML5 browsers.
• Support for Visual Studio 2013 Web Forms templates. The Control toolkit now works seamlessly with the Web Forms templates. You can use the Bootstrap support that was added to the templates, and use the Toolkit with Bootstrap.
• ASP.NET Web Optimization framework support. You can use the bundling and minification feature of ASP.NET with the toolkit. Check out ASP.NET Web Optimization framework to learn more.
• Dependency cleanup. The AjaxControl Toolkit is factored in a way to only bring in necessary libraries. As a result, it will no longer bring in libraries like AjaxMin, HtmlAgilityPack, or WindowsAzure Storage. All third-party package functionality is extracted to separate packages (ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.StaticResources, ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.HtmlEditor.Sanitizer) which are available as NuGet Packages.
• A great new installer. The new installation experience integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio and registers the Control Toolkit components into the Toolbox.

There's a full list of what's new in the v15.1 release available here: What's New in v15.1

Read this blog post by DevExpress on the AJAX Control Toolkit for more details on the release, how to upgrade, and report issues. You can file bug reports, make feature suggestions and review the source code online at: ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com and get the latest version of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit (DevExpress Edition) from their website: http://devexpress.com/act.

Pranav Rastogi, Program Manager, ASP.NET and Azure. Pranav works on ASP.NET and Azure in Microsoft. Pranav holds a MS degree from University of Florida and is a co-author of Professional ASP.NET 4.5 in C# and VB. As an adventure seeker, he travels a lot and can also be found backpacking. You can find him on Twitter at @rustd

Over the past few years, Visual Studio has been shipping products on a quicker cadence to ensure our customers have the best and most up-to-date tools in the industry. As part of this, we have been working to be more and more transparent to help you understand what we’re working on and show you how truly valuable your feedback is to the quality of our products. We generally share our plans with you via blogs or various feedback channels, like User Voice. Now we’re extending this transparency in an easy to consume format, to share some stuff we have in the works that we think you’ll be interested in. Starting today, Visual Studio is happy to share a feature timeline with you. As Brian announced a few months ago in his blog post A new Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server Features Timeline, the Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server teams have started doing this as well. We’ve gotten a really positive response from you and have decided to open this up across Visual Studio to share upcoming features we’re working on in the VS client.

The Visual Studio Feature Timeline gives a glimpse into what’s coming in future releases. Many of these items were pulled from your suggestions via UserVoice, as well as things we’ve shared in previous blogs and conferences. You won’t see dates on this timeline but you will see which VS release train we expect various languages and features to be part of. Of course, as we move on with future updates and major releases, you’ll start seeing us share features tied to these releases, as well. When we aren’t sure what release the in progress features will be in, we’ll list them as TBD. As with the VSO Timeline, some stuff may get cancelled or change along the way and we’ll do our best to communicate that to you as soon as possible.

As always, your feedback helps us do better and we’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

Thanks!

Megan

Megan Yount, Program Manager, Visual Studio Customer and Feedback Team Megan Yount has been at Microsoft for 3 years, working as a release manager to get awesome Visual Studio products into the hands of eager developers. She’s currently working on the customer and feedback team where she’s focused on making the latest, greatest Visual Studio products and content easy to find, understand, and download.

We’re continuing to improve upon the power and productivity of Visual Studio, making it easier to use, no matter what platform you’re on, no matter what app you’re building. We also want to make it easier for you to choose which edition of Visual Studio is the right one for you. Last November, we made Visual Studio Community 2013 available, our free, full featured and extensible IDE for non-enterprise application development. Today, we’re announcing the editions of Visual Studio 2015 that will be available when we release the final product this summer.

I’m excited to share that we’re bringing the value we deliver in Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate into one single offering called Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN. It includes all the high value features you’re already familiar with in Visual Studio Ultimate, along with new innovation that’s coming with the 2015 release. So, in addition to Visual Studio Community and Visual Studio Professional with MSDN, our new Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN rounds out the three primary Visual Studio 2015 offerings.

We’ll continue to offer Visual Studio Professional, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation Server Express, Visual Studio Express and MSDN Platforms as a part of the complete Visual Studio 2015 and MSDN portfolio.

Getting Visual Studio 2015

Customers who have an active subscription for Visual Studio Premium with MSDN or Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN will automatically get upgraded to Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN. And the pricing of Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN will be significantly less than the current price of Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN. Check out the Visual Studio 2015 Product Editions for detailed feature and pricing information, including the current promotions we’re running so you can get the most value out of Visual Studio today.

Also if you haven’t tried it yet, download Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 to test out the new features and send us your feedback through the usual channels (UserVoice, Send-a-Smile, or Connect).

Thank you,

Mitra

Mitra Azizirad, General Manager, Developer Platform Marketing and Sales With an expansive technical, business and marketing background, Mitra has led multiple and varied businesses across Microsoft for over two decades. For the last three years, she’s led the Developer Platform Marketing and Sales team, including Visual Studio Product Marketing.

It’s a pattern only if you see it happen at least twice, so here is our second post in the monthly top news series.

This month again we looked at various content across the developer sphere and bring you what we think are some of the top stories. We hope you find this list useful and interesting; and of course we welcome your feedback.

Top Trending Blogs for March 2015

Making the Internet of Things: Exploring the Littoral Space.Sam Stokes’s post on Making the Internet of Things Exploring the Littoral Space Data Storage was the fourth post /video in a series of content he published on Channel 9 DevRadio. In this video he dives into data storage and collection for our littoral space exploration and touches upon how this project also meets Common Core requirements for students interested in Life Science and Technology studies. Also check out his other videos in this series: Making the Internet of Things Exploring the Littoral Space – Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Angular 2 Built on TypeScript.Microsoft and Google collaborated on Angular 2, which is built on TypeScript. Google announced this at the ng-conf early March where Jonathan Turner from Microsoft demoed a preview of upcoming TypeScript 1.5 via an Angular 2 sample application. You can read all about it in Jonathan’s post on Angular 2: Built on TypeScript. On the same topic, Jordan Matthiesen shared a walkthrough of an Angular 2 demo in his post A preview of Angular 2 and TypeScript in Visual Studio.

ASP.NET 5 Released. Last month we announced the release of ASP.NET 5. ASP.NET 5 is an open source web framework for building modern web applications that can be developed and run on Windows, Linux and the Mac. It includes the MVC 6 framework, and will also be the basis for SignalR 3 which enables real time functionality to cloud connected applications. ASP.NET 5 is built on the .NET Core runtime, but it can also be run on the full .NET Framework for maximum compatibility. With this latest release ASP.NET is becoming leaner (it no longer requires System.Web.dll), more modular, cross-platform, and cloud optimized. Rami Sarieddine blogs about this in detail with his post Let’s welcome ASP.NET 5.

MSBuild is now Open Source. Richard Lander announced that the MSBuild Engine is now Open Source on GitHub and that we are contributing it to the .NET Foundation. You can invoke msbuild.exe directly on your project or solution file to build products where Visual Studio is not installed. For instance, we use MSBuild to build the .NET Core Libraries and .NET Core Runtime open source projects. TheNextWeb site also featured a post on Microsoft open sourcing Visual Studio’s build tool, MSBuild.

Why is DevOps so hard? Jason St-Cyr in his post on Why DevOps is so hard talks about the key things we all agree on when it comes to DevOps. He also talks about the things that make it really difficult to achieve these common goals. One of the issues he highlights is the difference in perspective between the development teams and operations teams that focus on different stages of the process and so have different priorities.

Windows 10 developer tooling Preview. We made apreview version ofWindows 10 developer tooling available to developers last month. In his post on Windows 10 developer tooling preview now available to Windows Insiders Cliff Simpkins talks about some key aspects of this release and also shares details on the many tools made available for developers to build content. Somasegar also blogged about Visual Studio Tools where he covered some key highlights in Visual Studio Tools for Windows 10 Technical Preview.

Make Debugging Faster with Visual Studio. When Debugging slows you down it can get frustrating. In his post on Make Debugging Faster with Visual Studio Andrew Hall takes a step by step approach to describing what makes the debugger slow. He starts by first talking about the 3 distinct debugger experiences that can slow you down and then explains each one in depth listing various reasons that could cause each type of delay. Check out his blog post to learn about what happens when you run the debugger and what could be causing it to make your application slow.

Behavior-Driven Development Combined with Domain-Driven Design. We have all heard about agile practices like Test Driven Development (TDD), but here a couple different ways to look at the agile practices. Behavior Driven Development (BDD) makes agile practices easy to understand and apply. Domain Driven Design (DDD) approaches software development by connecting it to core business concepts and providing a structure of practices and terminologies for making design decisions. In her article on BDD combined with DDD Jan Stenberg shares Konstantin Kudryashov’s work on combining these methodologies for better agile development.

The AJAX Control Toolkit March 2015 Update. The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is free and open-source and is maintained by DevExpress and in March they released an update to this toolkit. To learn about what’s new in this update check out Mehul Harry’s blog post announcing the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit v15.1. We also blogged about it on the Visual Studio Blog as well as shared a walkthrough with code snippets on the WebDev blog.

Connect(“Live”); Debugging and Cloud Diagnostics. We kicked off our Connect(“Live”) live streaming sessions with a Q&A session with the Debugging and Cloud Diagnostics Team featuring Saurabh Bhatia, Dan Fernandez, Andrew Hall, Boris Scholl. The goal with these events is to give you more opportunities to connect with the product teams throughout the year. If you missed the event you can watch a recording on Channel 9. To learn about upcoming events check out Connect(“Live”) on Channel 9.

Feedback?

We hope you enjoyed reading this list. We will bring you a new one each month, so stay tuned and please don’t hesitate to send us feedback by commenting below.

Thanks,

Radhika

Radhika Tadinada, Program Manager, Visual Studio @RadhikaTadinada Radhika has been at Microsoft for almost 4 years. She first started off as a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Platform team where she helped build IDE features. She is currently with the Customer team and manages the Visual Studio blog.

In December 2014 we released the RTM version of Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio. This extension combines the power of Sample Browser and Bing Code Search to make it easy for you to find and reuse over 19 million code snippets and sample projects. Last month, we improved the user experience of Bing Developer Assistant in response to your feedback on the Visual Studio gallery.

Many first-time users also told us that the name ‘Bing Developer Assistant’ was misleading and made it seem like this extension had something to do with ‘Bing Maps’ or ‘Bing API’. With this update we are renaming ‘Bing Developer Assistant’ to ‘Developer Assistant’.

In this post I have highlighted a few improvements. Check out the description page for this extension to read the full list of improvements available in this update. 

To get started, you can download the Developer Assistant from the Visual Studio Gallery.

IntelliSense window now pinnable

In the RTM version of this extension, the IntelliSense Window self-dismisses when you click anywhere outside the window, which makes it inconvenient to reuse the code samples in your code. To address this, we now enable you to pin this window by clicking the ‘Pin’ button. You can move or dock the window anywhere in Visual Studio so it doesn’t block the view of your code. You can also pin multiple API Help windows and dock them together for easy access.

“How do I…” code search in IntelliSense

In this update we added ‘How do I’ code search back to the IntelliSense Window. This change makes it easier to find code samples that address certain programming tasks. You can also invoke the ‘How do I’ search using the ‘Ctrl + Shift + F1’ shortcut key.

Settings to pick your preferred IntelliSense experience

In response to feedback, we added a setting so you can pick the default IntelliSense behaviors – Visual Studio’s IntelliSense or Developer Assistant-enhanced IntelliSense. This setting is available under Tools / Options… / Developer Assistant / IntelliSense.

If you love what you see in this version of Developer Assistant, please recommend it to your friends and colleagues. If you run into any issues or have feedback and suggestions, please contact us at bingdevassistant@microsoft.com.  We look forward to your continued feedback, since it has really helped us improve the extension.

Thank you!

Scott Ge, Business Program Manager, Developer Experience (DX) team Scott has worked at Microsoft for 7 years. He is dedicated to driving the developer experience and productivity in using code/script samples. In ‘Bing Developer Assistant’, Bing, MSR, Visual Studio, and DX teams are working together to provide contextual and personalized code help in the development lifecycle.

Today we release Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview 2. VSTU is Microsoft’s free Visual Studio add-on that enables a rich programming and debugging experience for working with the Unity gaming tools and platform.

The main feature of Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview 2 is the official support for Unity 5, the new major version of Unity that was released last month. VSTU is available for download on the Visual Studio Gallery at the following links:

• Visual Studio 2015 Preview Tools for Unity
• Visual Studio 2013 Tools for Unity
• Visual Studio 2012 Tools for Unity
• Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Unity

The support for Unity 5 aside, we continued to focus on bringing more features from the Visual Studio debugger to VSTU. The highlights of VSTU 2.0 Preview 2 include:

Option panel for VSTU: We’re always working on bringing new features to VSTU. Using our option panel you can enable or disable them depending on your use cases.

Experimental support for breaking on exceptions: The ability to break the debugger when an exception happens in your Unity code is a common feature request. You’ll currently need to enable this experimental feature in our option panel, then you’ll be able to use the new Exception Settings window to configure which exception you want to break on.

Function Breakpoints: VSTU now supports creating function breakpoints. A good use case for those are when you want to put a breakpoint in every MonoBehaviour message in your game code, without having to create each breakpoint manually.

Hit Count:hit count breakpoints are a form of conditional breakpoints, where the debugger breaks depending on how many times the breakpoint has been hit while the code is running. This is particularly useful when debugging loops.

Object IDs: If you don’t know about this little gem in the Visual Studio debugger, I invite you to read about it in this blog post on Make Object ID. Basically, object IDs allow you to get a reference to an object even if it’s not in scope.

Our changelog contains many more features and bug fixes. If you have any suggestion for VSTU, please post them on UserVoice, and if you encounter any issue please report it through the Visual Studio Connect site.

Jb Evain, Senior Software Engineer, Visual Studio Platform Team (@jbevain) Jb runs the Visual Studio Tools for Unity experience for the Visual Studio Platform team. He recently joined Microsoft as part of the acquisition of SyntaxTree, a company he founded and where he led the development of UnityVS. He has a passion for developer tools and programming languages, and has been working in developer technologies for over a last decade.