A Look At : Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 CTP2

New technology improvements in Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 CTP 2

 

Technology improvements

The following technology improvements were made in this release.

CodeLens

• CodeLens jobs that are running on the Team Foundation Server job agent have been optimized for performance specifically while processing branching and merging changesets.

Debugger

• If you have more than one monitor, Visual Studio will remember which monitor a Windows Store application was last run on.
• You can debug x86 applications that are built by .NET native.
• When you analyze managed memory dump files, you can go to Definition and Find All References of the selected type.
• You can debug the dump files from .NET Native applications by using Visual Studio debugger.

General

• The Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio are now included in Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 CTP2. This initial integration as part of CTP2 includes some software updates and performance improvements.

IntelliTrace

• You can skip straight to the details of performance events that are exported from Application Insights to IntelliTrace.

Profiler

• The Performance and Diagnostics hub can open profiling sessions (.diagsession files) that were exported from the F12 tools in the latest developer preview of Internet Explorer 11.
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Win32 applications are supported by the new Memory Usage Tool in the Performance and Diagnostics Hub. For more information about how to use the tool to troubleshoot issues in native and managed memory, go to the following blog post:
  Diagnosing memory issues with the new Memory Usage Tool in Visual Studio

Release Management

• You can useWindowsPowerShell or theWindowsPowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) feature to deploy and manage configuration data. Additionally, you can deploy to the following environments without having to set up Microsoft Deployment Agent:
  • Microsoft Azure environments
  • On-premise environments (Standard environments)

Testing Tools

• You can add custom fields and custom work flows for test plans and test suites.
• You can use Manage Test Suites permission for granting access to test suites.
• You can track changes to test plans and test suites by using work item history.

For more information about these features, see the following Visual Studio Developer Tools blog article:

Test Plan and Test Suite Customization with TFS2013 Update3

Visual Studio IDE

• CodeLens authors and changes indicators are now available for Git repositories.
• In Code Map, links are styled by using colors, and they display in the improved Legend.
• Debugger Map automatically zooms to the call stack entry of interest and preserves user’s zoom preferences.
• You can drag binaries from the Windows file explorer to a code map, and then start exploring binaries by using Code Map.

Known issues

Testing Tools

• When you try to upgrade an existing TFS server that has Test management data to Visual Studio 2013 Team Foundation Server Update 3 CTP2 in JPN or CHS, the upgrade of Test Case Management service does not work.

Visual Studio IDE

• In Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Update 3 CTP2 localized (non en-us) drops, when trying to request a Code Map, or a Dependency Graph for the solution, the directed graph is not produced.

 

For more information on Visual Studio 2013 and other upgrades, visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2933779/en-us

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 CTP2 – New Features!!

Today, the Visual Studio team announced the release of CTP2 of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 .  Our team added a few useful features and did some bug fixing in this update to improve the web development experience.  We will have future blogs to talk about some of the features in detail.

New SASS project item and editor

We added LESS in VS2013 RTM, and we now have a SASS project item and editor.  SASS editor features are comparable to LESS editor, include colorization, variable and Mixins IntelliSense, comment/uncomment, quick info, formatting, syntax validation, outlining, goto definition, color picker, tools option setting etc.

New JSON project item and editor

We have added a JSON project item and editor to Visual Studio.  Current JSON editor features include colorization, syntax validation, brace completion, outlining, tools option setting and more.

Create remote Azure resources option when creating a new Web project

We added a Windows Azure “Create remote resources” checkbox on the new web application dialog.  By choosing it, you will be able to integrate the experience of creating a new web application, setting up the Windows Azure publishing site for testing, and creating publishing profile in a few simple steps.

MVC/SPA Template changes

We integrated Microsoft.AspNet.Identity 2.0-alpha1 into the new project templates.  You can upgrade it to Microsoft.AspNet.Identity 2.0-beta1 to use two factor authentication. 

For the SPA template, we removed the complicated AJAX based authentication, it now uses the simpler authentication method used in the MVC template.

LESS editor improvements

We added features including nested media queries, named parameter support, support for selector interpolation, support for semicolons as parameter separators, goto definition for @import, goto definition of variables and mixins.

Knockout IntelliSense upgrade

We added a non-standard KnockOut syntax for VS intelliSense, “ko-vs-editor viewModel:” syntax.  It can be used to bind to multiple view models on a page using comments in the form:

Code Snippet

1. <!– ko-vs-editor viewModel: <any javascript expression that evaluates to an object> –>
2.  
3. <!– /ko-vs-editor >

We also added support for nested ViewModel IntelliSense, so you may drill into deeply nested objects on the ViewModel. 

<div data-bind=”text: foo.bar.baz.etc” />

The IntelilSense displayed is the full IntelliSense of the JavaScript Object. 

New URL Picker in HTML, Razor, CSS, LESS and SASS pages

VS 2013 shipped with no URL picker outside of WebForm pages.  The new URL picker for HTML, Razor, CSS, LESS and SASS editors is a dialog-free, fluent typing picker that understands ‘..’ and filters file lists appropriately for img’s and links.

Browser Link New Features

BrowserLink now supports HTTPS connections and will list that in Dashboard with other connections as long as the certificate is trusted by browser.

ASP.NET MVC 5.1.1, ASP.NET Web API 2.1.1 and ASP.NET Web Pages 3.1.1 are included

We announced ASP.NET MVC 5.1, ASP.NET Web API 2.1 and ASP.NET Web Pages 3.1 in January.  We integrated that release with some minor bug fixes into VS 2013 Update 2 CTP2.

Known Problems

Web Essential 2013 is not compatible with the Update 2 CTP2. If you install Update 2 CTP2, after opening Visual Studio, you’ll get an error message “EditorExtensionsPackage” couldn’t be loaded.   We hope to have a new version of Web Essentials out soon to support this release.

Summary

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p>We hope you can evaluate these new features and let us know about any bugs and suggestions.  For VS features, please use Connect to submit bugs, ASP.NET UserVoice to submit and vote for suggestions, and the ASP.NET Forums for Q&A.  For MVC/WebAPI/WebPages issues, please submit any issues you encounter and feature suggestions for future releases on our CodePlex site.