You can read more about the new features of Team Foundation Server 2015 on Brian Harry’s blog, and can get started installing or migrating to TFS2015 today.

DevOps and Agility

Development teams today are focused first-and-foremost on being agile, and embracing DevOps practices is increasingly becoming central to how teams think about creating an agile team and agile processes.  Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online provide integrated DevOps services that enable teams to continuously deliver, continuously monitor and continuously learn so they can optimize their agility.

Across Team Foundation Server 2015 and the cloud-hosted Visual Studio Online service we offer a comprehensive set of DevOps capabilities.

Team Foundation Server has been a great tool for .NET teams for many years, but over the last few years Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online have grown to provide 1^st class support no matter what language or platform you are targeting. Whether it’s Node.js or Java, iOS or Android, both Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online will provide comprehensive support for all of your teams’ developer service needs.

Here’s a sampling of some of the highlights of the new DevOps capabilities in Team Foundation Server 2015 - for more details, check out Brian's blog post.

Planning

The agile boards in Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online are a critical tool for teams to track their work and progress on a day-to-day basis.  Team Foundation Server 2015 includes major updates to the agile boards experience including customization, tagging, swimlanes and more.

Develop and Test

As part of the increased support for Git, Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online have introduced introduce a new Pull Requests code review experience for Git projects, enabling faster developer collaboration earlier in the development process.

Build and Release

Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online include a brand new build system which provides a simple web-based interface for configuring pluggable, cross platform build workflows for your continuous integration pipeline.

Summary

I’m excited to welcome the final release of Team Foundation Server 2015, and I encourage development teams who have not already started to look at migrating to TFS2015 to get started today.  For those not already using TFS, this release makes it easier than ever to use Team Foundation Server across the breadth of your development team’s application lifecycle and DevOps needs. 

Namaste!

Today, I’m excited to announce that along with the RTM of Windows 10, you can now build apps for the Universal Windows Platform with Visual Studio 2015. The Windows Dev Center is also now open and accepting submissions of your Universal Windows apps.

Since the first preview of these tools in March, we have made significant updates to many parts of Visual Studio to make it easy to build apps for the Universal Windows Platform. Throughout the course of the past few months, these tools have gotten better with your feedback – thank you!

Acquiring the tools

If you don’t already have Visual Studio 2015 RTM, you can install the free Community Edition. If you prefer the Professional or Enterprise edition, you can download them from VisualStudio.com, and during setup, choose ‘Custom’ to install the Tools for Universal Windows Apps.

If you already have Visual Studio 2015 RTM, you can now add these tools to your existing Visual Studio installation. You can run the installer, or open Programs and Features from Control Panel, select Visual Studio and click Change. Then in setup, click Modify and select the Tools for Universal Windows Apps.

Creating Projects

You can create a Universal Windows apps with the new project templates in Visual Studio 2015 in a language of your choice – C#, VB, C++, or JavaScript. With Windows 10, it is now possible to have a single universal app project that when deployed can run on all Windows 10 devices like PC, Phone, Tablet, or XBox. However, just as on Windows 8.1, you still have the option to have multiple projects in your solution that you can tailor for functionality and form-factor exhibited by various devices running Windows 10 and can maximize code sharing across those projects using Shared projects. You can also create Win32 applications that target the Windows 10 SDK to leverage the new APIs exposed by the platform.

.NET Framework libraries delivered as NuGet packages

The entire set of .NET Framework libraries is included in your Universal Windows app as a set of NuGet packages (built on top of NuGet v3). In addition to providing you a rich .NET surface area that works consistently across all Windows 10 devices, this will also will allow us to bring newer APIs to you at a faster cadence. We will also be able to consistently evolve these APIs across all mobile devices that you can target using set of updated platform targets in Portable Class Libraries (PCLs).

XAML Designer and Editor

The Universal Windows platform allows you to tailor your app for any Windows 10 device using built-in platform capabilities. The XAML Designer has been enhanced to allow you to create and edit view states that can be triggered automatically when running under different form factors. Combined with new Windows 10 controls like the RelativePanel and the ability to specify completely tailored views on different devices, you should have the tool to delight your users with great user experiences. See this video to get an overview of just how easy it is to get started with designing your first XAML app.

.NET Native improvements

Windows 10 Universal apps built with C# and VB are optimized with .NET Native, which provides up to 60% faster start time and 15-20% less memory usage.  We have continued to make our .NET Native compiler throughput and error diagnostics better. We have also enabled cloud compilation of your apps in the Windows Dev Center, allowing us to eventually deliver fixes and improvements to your apps without requiring re-submissions. Learn more about .NET Native here.

Packaging apps for the Store

You can reserve names for your Universal Windows apps with the Store, and create app packages for submissions to the Windows Dev Center. Visual Studio also generates packages that are ready for side-loading in an enterprise scenario using the tools in the SDK. The manifest designer in Visual Studio has been updated to allow you to target the full breadth of capabilities that you can express for your app.

Summary

Try out the tools and send us your feedback via the Visual Studio Connect site, Send-a-Smile or the on Windows tools forums. We are looking forward to your submissions of apps targeting Windows 10 and demonstrating the entire breadth of capabilities unleashed by this new platform release.

Namaste!

These releases are the next big step in the journey we outlined last November to bring the productivity of Visual Studio and .NET to any developer working on any kind of application while also delivering a new level of innovation in developer productivity for all Visual Studio developers.

To celebrate today’s releases, you can join us online for the Visual Studio 2015 Release Event, check out 60+ on-demand feature videos or just dive right in and download Visual Studio 2015 now.

The Visual Studio Family

Over the last few years, the Visual Studio family has expanded to be broader than ever before.  And the reception from developers has been great to see.

At the core is the Visual Studio IDE that millions of developers around the world love and use day-in and day-out to build great applications.  Last year, we introduced Visual Studio Community - a fully-featured Visual Studio IDE which is free for non-enterprise development.  Since November, we have seen over 5 million downloads of Visual Studio Community, the fastest ever adoption of a Visual Studio product.

Two years ago, we introduced Visual Studio Online, bringing a rich collection of cloud-hosted developer services to the Visual Studio Family – from source control to agile backlog management to hosted build and application insights. Today, we have more than 3.2 million developers registered for Visual Studio Online.

And earlier this year, in April, we released a preview of the new Visual Studio Code, a refined code editor for Mac, Linux and Windows supporting cross-platform web and cloud development.  In the last 3 months, we’ve see more than 500k downloads of Visual Studio Code, with nearly half of those downloads on Mac and Linux.

It’s been great to see the excitement and passion around the whole Visual Studio family of products.

Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6

Today’s release of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 brings hundreds of new features for developers building for desktop, web, mobile, cloud and more. 

Here I’ll highlight just a few of the big new things in Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6.  For more, check out Visual Studio release notes as well as the Visual Studio blog, the .NET blog, and Scott Guthrie’s blog.

Innovation in Productivity

As developers, we spend a lot of our time day-in and day-out in Visual Studio. So with every new release, it is our mission to deliver new innovation that provides the most productive developer experience possible inside Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2015 continues this trend, with improvements in productivity across debugging and diagnostics, code editing and refactoring, and programming languages.

Debugging and Diagnostics

Visual Studio 2015 unifies debugging and profiling into a single Diagnostics Tools window, bringing insights about the correctness and performance of your running application into context during development.  And with PerfTips, you even get performance information right in your code as you set breakpoints and step with the debugger.

Code Editing and Refactoring

In the editor, C# and VB developers can use the new Roslyn-based tooling, including Light Bulbs that proactively suggest potential fixes or code refactorings tooling.  With Roslyn’s code analyzers, developers can even customize the warnings and suggestions delivered inside the editor to meet their team’s needs.

We’ve also added a brand new XAML editor with tons of new features to easily navigate through code including Peek.

Programming Languages

Along with Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 come the final versions of C# 6 and Visual Basic 14.  With dozens of new language features that simplify common coding patterns, the new versions of C# and VB.NET offer a big step forward for .NET developer productivity.

Visual Studio 2015 also includes significantly improved support for C++ 11/14/17 along with TypeScript 1.5, F# 4.0 and tools for Python and dozens of other languages.

Openness for Web, Cloud and Mobile Development

Whether it’s developing for the web, the cloud or for mobile, developers are looking for flexibility and choice.  Visual Studio and .NET are providing this choice, offering the ability to target new platforms, to use new programming languages, and to take existing skills and applications to new environments. 

As one part of this, over the last 2 years we have been open sourcing many of the components of our programming stacks in Visual Studio and .NET – from Roslyn and TypeScript to CoreCLR and the Python Tools for Visual Studio.  On top of this, it’s easier than ever to work with open source technologies within Visual Studio.   

Web and Cloud Development

Along with .NET 4.6, we are also making available ASP.NET 4.6, the newest version of our Web development framework.  ASP.NET 4.6 adds support for HTTP/2 as well as support for the newest C# features and the new Entity Framework 6.1.3.  Visual Studio tooling for web development continues to expand to offer HTML and CSS tooling with up-to-date standards support and a much richer JSON editor.

Visual Studio 2015 also includes the latest Azure SDK providing one-click provisioning and deployment to Azure for web sites and cloud services, along with easy management of all or your cloud resources. Whether your application is using IaaS or Paas in Azure, built with .NET or Python or Node.js, or deploying to Windows or Linux or Docker containers, the cloud tools in Visual Studio 2015 let you easily integrate with Azure.

On top of this, developers can also use the preview of ASP.NET 5 in Visual Studio 2015.  ASP.NET 5 is one of the most significant updates to the ASP.NET platform we’ve done.  Because ASP.NET 5 runs on the CoreCLR, it can be deployed to your choice of platform, whether it’s Linux, Mac or Windows.  On top of this, ASP.NET 5 offers foundational improvements in rapid development, cloud configuration, dependency management and composability.

Mobile Development

Mobile development is increasingly about building mobile experiences that run across many mobile platforms.  Visual Studio 2015 includes cross-platform mobile development tools for building applications targeting iOS, Android and Windows, and offers developers choice in what languages and technologies to use to developer their mobile applications.

Many developers start by building mobile-ready browser based applications using responsive HTML, CSS and JavaScript.  Visual Studio 2015’s rich web tooling, integrated debugging and support for the latest web UI frameworks provide the tools needed to build great mobile-ready web sites.

If you prefer to build a mobile app experience that installs natively on the device, Visual Studio 2015 offers integrated tools for Apache Cordova, enabling you to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript (or TypeScript) to build cross-platform mobile applications that deploy to the consumer on enterprise store.  Visual Studio 2015 even includes a high-performance Visual Studio Emulator for Android for debugging and testing Android applications.

For developers who prefer the richness of .NET, Visual Studio 2015 enables building Universal Windows Apps to target the breadth of Windows devices, from desktop to phone to IoT or even HoloLens.  And by combining Visual Studio 2015 and Xamarin, developers can extend their .NET applications to also target iOS and Android.  With Xamarin, everything you can do in Java or Objective-C is available from .NET and Visual Studio.

On top of these, Visual Studio 2015 also provides cross-platform C++ development for shared components targeting iOS, Android and Windows as well as integration with game engines like Unity to easily build cross platform games. 

Visual Studio 2015 even includes a high-performance Visual Studio Emulator for Android for debugging and testing Android applications.

DevOps and Agility

Development teams today are focused first-and-foremost on being agile.  But increasingly, the trend towards embracing DevOps practices is becoming central to how teams think about creating an agile team and agile processes.  Visual Studio 2015, Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online provide integrated DevOps services that enable teams to continuously deliver, continuously monitor and continuously learn so they can optimize their agility.

These core capabilities across the DevOps spectrum are available in Team Foundation Server 2015 (RC2 available now with the final release available soon) and in the cloud-hosted Visual Studio Online service.

Team Foundation Server has been a great tool for .NET teams for many years, but over the last few years we’ve been increasing our focus on making sure Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online provide 1^st class support no matter what language or platform you are targeting. 

Whether it’s Node.js or Java, iOS or Android, both Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online will provide comprehensive support for all of your teams’ developer service needs.

Planning

The agile boards in Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online are a critical tool for teams to track their work and progress on a day-to-day basis.  Team Foundation Server 2015 includes updates to the agile boards experience including customization, tagging, swimlanes and more.

Develop and Test

Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online have introduced introduce a new Pull Requests code review experience for Git projects, enabling faster developer collaboration earlier in the development process.

Build and Release

Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online include a brand new build system which provides a simple web-based interface for configuring pluggable, cross platform build workflows for your continuous integration pipeline.

Monitor and Learn

Just as important as getting code into production is understand and learning from you code in production.  Visual Studio 2015 provides one-click integration of Application Insights for both server and client projects, making it seamless to get rich and immediate insights on the performance, availability and usage of your applications – both during development and in production.

Visual Studio Partner Ecosystem

Just as important as the products themselves is the ecosystem of extensions available for Visual Studio that add support for new platforms, new workflows and new application types into the Visual Studio experience.  In just the last year, we saw over 13M downloads of extensions from the Visual Studio gallery.

Today we have 84 of our Visual Studio partners sim-shipping extensions supporting Visual Studio 2015.  And it’s easier than ever to integrate with Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online to deliver new experiences on top of the Visual Studio family of products.

Conclusion

Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 are an exciting next step for developer tools from Microsoft - combining new productivity for existing Visual Studio users with new platform support for developers targeting a wider range of platforms and programming models. 

I encourage you to join us online for the Visual Studio 2015 Release Event, check out 60+ on-demand feature videos or just dive right in and download Visual Studio 2015 now.  Thank you to all the Visual Studio users who have participated in the development of these products by giving us feedback and getting engaged in the developer community.  Welcome to Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6.

Namaste!

Visual Studio 2015 is a big release.  We are opening up Visual Studio to developers targeting new platforms – from cross-platform mobile development targeting iOS, Android and Windows, to game development targeting Unity, Unreal, Cocos and more.  At the same time, Visual Studio 2015 redefines developer productivity with proactive diagnostics tooling and the new Roslyn language services for C# and VB.  And together, Visual Studio 2015, Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online help teams to embrace DevOps with great agile backlog management, Azure cloud tooling, hosted continuous integration, and Application Insights across all the components of your application.

To celebrate the release, we invite you to join us online on July 20^th to learn about the new features and technologies. You will be able to engage in live, interactive Q&A sessions with the engineering team, as well as deep-dive into technical details covered in over 60 on-demand video sessions.

For more details, check out the Visual Studio 2015 Final Release Event site, and join us on July 20 at 3:30 pm UTC (8:30 am PDT) to watch the Visual Studio 2015 final release event online.

Namaste! 

Last November, we took two big steps toward delivering great tools for any developer working on any application – introducing the free and fully-featured Visual Studio Community edition of our flagship developer tools and announcing that we would be taking .NET Core open source and cross-platform.

Over the last 6 months, we’ve seen incredible results from both of these efforts with over 2.7 million downloads of Visual Studio Community and a vibrant ecosystem of developers and organizations rallying around open-source, cross-platform .NET development.

But we didn’t want to stop there! Today, I’m excited to introduce:

• Visual Studio Code, a new, free, cross-platform code editor for building modern web and cloud applications on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.
• Visual Studio 2015 RC, including great new productivity and diagnostics features, tools for building Universal Windows Applications, and cross-platform development support for building applications spanning from Windows to Linux to iOS and Android.
• Application Insights, now in Public Preview, offers a 360-degree telemetry view of your applications from devices to web to server, including integrating HockeyApp’s cross-platform capabilities to deliver crash analytics for iOS- and Android-based apps.
• .NET Core has reached a major cross-platform milestone with a preview of the .NET Core runtime distribution available for Linux and Mac.

Together, these releases are another important step in opening up access to our developer tools and services to the broadest possible set of developers working on the widest range of applications and using a variety of development environments.

Introducing Visual Studio Code (Preview)

Millions of developer today turn to lightweight code editors and command-line centric development workflows as their primary application development environment.  With Visual Studio Code, we are introducing a new, free, cross-platform code editor for building modern web and cloud applications on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, available in preview today.

Visual Studio Code offers a new approach to editor-centric, code-focused developer tools – combining the streamlined UI of a modern text editor with rich code assistance, navigation and integrated debugging.

At its heart, Visual Studio Code features a powerful, fast code editor great for day-to-day use.  The Code editor includes keyboard support with customizable bindings, syntax highlighting, bracket matching, auto indent, and snippets, and support for dozens of languages, and scales to instantly open large and small files alike.

Building on its editor, Code delivers rich coding experiences beyond those seen in traditional text editors, including code assistance, code navigation, linting, and refactoring enabled within the core editor experience.  And Code understands Git, and delivers great Git workflows and source diffs integrated with the editor.

But developers don’t spend all their time just writing code: they go back and forth between coding and debugging. Debugging is the most popular feature in Visual Studio, and often the one feature from an IDE that developers want in a leaner coding experience. Visual Studio Code includes a streamlined, integrated debugging experience, currently with support for Node.js debugging, and more coming soon.

Visual Studio Code builds on top of a tools service architecture to enable rich code analysis support for C# and TypeScript.  Based on technology from the OmniSharp and TypeScript Server projects, the language services of Visual Studio Code are available as open source projects and offering integration into a wide range of alternate editors – including Sublime Text, Vim and Atom.  In future previews, we will be opening up the public extensibility model for Code, enabling an even broader range of rich language integrations with Visual Studio Code.

Visual Studio Code is built on the best of web, native and language-specific technologies.  Code builds upon Electron (previously Atom Shell), a cross platform desktop application shell, using Node.js, HTML, TypeScript and CSS.  Our engineering team are contributing to the Electron project along with engineers from GitHub, Facebook, Slack and more.  Code also uses a newer, faster version of the same industrial-strength HTML-based editor that has powered the “Monaco” code editor used in Azure Websites, OneDrive, Internet Explorer’s F12 tools and more.

A preview of Visual Studio Code is available for download now.

Visual Studio 2015 RC

Visual Studio 2015 brings new tools for developers to target a wide variety of platforms across mobile, web, server and cloud development.  Today, we are making the Visual Studio 2015 Release Candidate available for download, with a go-live license to enable you to take Visual Studio 2015 into production.

For developers targeting the Windows ecosystem, Visual Studio 2015 RC provides great tools for building apps and games for the Universal Windows Platform spanning that run across all Windows 10 devices, including phones, tablets, PCs, Xbox, IoT and HoloLens.  With new UI Debugging Tools, an improved XAML designer and enhanced profiling and debugging features, developing apps for Windows has never been easier.

For mobile developers, Visual Studio 2015 includes tools for building cross-platform apps that run on all of today’s popular mobile platforms including Android, iOS and Windows. With Visual Studio developers can target those platforms using Apache Cordova, Xamarin, or C++.

For web and server development, Visual Studio continues to provide many choices for application development with tooling for Python or Node.js, and of course .NET options with languages such as C#, Visual Basic or F#.

­In addition to new platform support, Visual Studio 2015 brings dozens of new productivity and diagnostics features to developers.  The list of improvements here are numerous, but one important example is the new Diagnostics Tools window that provides on-by-default access to key performance and memory usage information during normal debug sessions, giving you insights into application performance earlier in the development cycle. 

With many developers working with open source projects in Visual Studio today, we’ve also added GitHub integration to Team Explorer in Visual Studio, providing easy access to your open source projects in GitHub from the familiar Visual Studio source control integration.  Even better, this functionality has been co-developed by the teams at Microsoft and GitHub.

The Visual Studio 2015 RC is available for download now.

.NET 2015

Today we delivered the next milestone in our .NET 2015 vision, announcing the availability of the full .NET Framework 4.6 RC and .NET Core 5 Preview, as well as a preview release of the .NET Core runtime and libraries for Linux and Mac OS X.

Together, Visual Studio 2015 RC and .NET Framework 4.6 RC deliver a number of new tooling experiences for WPF developers as well improvements in stability, performance and feature enhancements in the WPF runtime.

.NET Core is being implemented and supported by Microsoft and developed as a set of open source projects on GitHub under the .NET Foundation in close collaboration with an active developer community of individuals and organizations invested in taking .NET cross-platform.  Since we began the process of open sourcing .NET Core last November, we’ve seen great momentum for the project, with new capabilities, new platforms, and new community engagement coming fast. 

Today, we are making an early preview of .NET Core for Linux and Mac OS X available for developers to experiment with.

Also part of the .NET 2015 wave, ASP.NET 5 is the most significant architectural update to date, making ASP.NET leaner, more modular, cross-platform, and cloud optimized.  ASP.NET 5 runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and built on top of .NET Core.  Today, ASP.NET 5 RC is available and tools for ASP.NET 5 are available as part of Visual Studio 2015 RC and Visual Studio Code.

Application Insights Public Preview

Visual Studio Online Application Insights, available in public preview today, is an analytics solution for any developer working on any application, providing a comprehensive 360° view of your application’s performance, availability and usage.  With today’s public preview, we are launching a new cloud-friendly pricing model based on telemetry volume per app and designed to offer a great feature-complete free pricing tier.

Originally designed to provide the best analytics experience for ASP.NET and Windows app developers, Application Insights now comes with built-in support for a wide set of platforms.  From rich J2EE server app supports, to iOS and Android device app analytics based on HockeyApp’s industry-leading crash analytics support, as well as Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby and WordPress all available open source on GitHub.    

Application Insights provides intuitive views and powerful tools to allow fast troubleshooting and diagnostics, helps analyze user activity and adoption, and prioritizes future investments accordingly. And Application Insights offers easy integration with a range of IDEs, from Visual Studio to Eclipse and XCode.

Application Insights is available in public preview now.

Conclusion

Today’s releases continue to expand access to our runtimes, tools and services to any developer and any application. 

Visual Studio Code provides an editor-centric code-focused developer tool for OS X, Linux and Windows.  Application Insights provides a 360° view of your application’s performance, availability and usage across a wide variety of client and server technologies.  Visual Studio 2015 RC provides go-live access to great tools for Windows, cross-platform mobile, and a range of web and server technologies.  And .NET 2015 brings open source .NET Core and ASP.NET 5 to Windows, Linux and Mac. 

Check them all out now at visualstudio.com, watch the Build 2015 session recordings and catch-up on your favorite features with new short Connect(“on-demand”); feature videos available now.

Namaste!

Today, we are taking support for game development in Visual Studio forward in a big way through collaborations with three of the premier independent gaming engine providers: Unity Technologies, Epic Games, and Chukong Technologies.

Together, we are making it even easier for game developers to use the rich capabilities of the Visual Studio IDE to develop games for today’s most popular platforms. Each of these top gaming engines' installers will now offer the ability to co-install Visual Studio Community on Windows, along with the plug-ins required for Windows developers building for these engines. In addition, we will make it easier to discover and use the tools for Unity, Unreal and Cocos2d from within Visual Studio 2015.

You can learn more about today’s partnerships on the Unity, Unreal, Cocos2d and Visual Studio sites.

These improvements build upon joint work to make access to the engines and tools needed for game development available to a broader base of developers. With Visual Studio Community, we have made the popular IDE that professional developers use freely available for non-enterprise usage. And across Unity 5 Personal Edition, Unreal Engine 4, and Cocos2d, there are now great free options for these game engines.

Already today, Visual Studio offers Visual Studio Tools for Unity, a free Visual Studio add-on that enables a rich programming and debugging experience for working with the Unity gaming tools and platform. With today’s announcements, we are excited to expand Visual Studio’s game development capabilities and overall experience with even tighter integration with Unity and new support for Unreal Engine 4 and Cocos2d.

Each of these engines supports a broad array of today’s most popular gaming platforms, and through their cross-platform game development frameworks, expand on the existing cross-platform mobile development support in Visual Studio for Cordova (HTML), Xamarin (C#) and C++. Here’s just a sampling of the platforms supported by these three frameworks:

• Cocos2d supports web browsers and native platforms including OS X, Windows, iOS and Android.
• Unity supports 21 different platforms, including Xbox One, SteamOS, OS X, iOS, Android, Windows, WebGL, Oculus Rift and GearVR.
• Unreal Engine 4 enables developers to deploy projects across platforms including Windows, Xbox One, Playstation 4, OS X, iOS, Android, Linux, SteamOS, HTML5 as well as Steam VR, Oculus Rift and Gear VR.

I am excited to join forces with these game engines in targeting today’s most popular devices and platforms for both 2D and 3D gaming. Together, we will be working to deliver the best possible game development experiences to users of these engines from within the Visual Studio IDE, further unlocking game developer creativity and productivity. 

While we work on the tighter integration, you can download Visual Studio Community and get Unity, Unreal and Cocos2d for game development today.

Namaste!

Today we are making available a first preview of the Visual Studio 2015 tools for building Windows 10 applications.  Windows Insiders can get access to the Windows 10 Technical Preview tools now, and use them with Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 and the Windows 10 Technical Preview.

Windows 10 will be an exciting release for developers, with support for Windows universal apps that run across all Windows 10 devices and improved tooling for every Windows application type.

In this post, we’ll take a look at a few of the highlights of the preview Visual Studio 2015 tools for Windows 10 Technical Preview.  You can read more about the Windows 10 Technical Preview tools on the Windows blog.

Creating Windows universal apps

You can create a Windows universal apps with the new project templates in Visual Studio 2015 in a language of your choice – C#, VB, C++, or JavaScript. With Windows 10, it is now possible to have a single universal app project that when deployed can run on all Windows 10 devices like PC, Phone, Tablet, or XBOX. However, just as on Windows 8.1, you still have the option to have multiple projects in your solution that you can tailor for functionality and form-factor exhibited by various devices running Windows 10 and can maximize code sharing across those projects using Shared projects.

Testing your Windows universal apps on a PC and phone

You can deploy a Windows universal app to any device running Windows 10. To deploy applications created using this preview version of the tools, you need to have the latest PC flight of Windows 10 installed. Deploying the application to a phone running Windows 10 is not yet supported and will come in the future with a flight of a future release on Phone. In the meanwhile, you can experiment by deploying your app to a Windows 10 Phone emulator that is installed as a part of these tools. Support for other Windows 10 devices like XBOX is not yet available in this preview.

Tailoring your app for a particular device

With Windows 10 universal apps, you can choose to tailor your app to light up additional device-specific capabilities using adaptive code patterns. You can reference an Extension SDK that supplies either Windows or Windows Mobile specific APIs and write code that checks for the presence of the API when running on any device before code execution.

In the example above, we have added a reference to a Windows Mobile extension SDK. Wrapping the access to such an API in an if block allows for the code execution to be bypassed when the app is running on any Windows 10 device that does not support the API.

This enables you to adapt your application to deliver the right user experience on the right device.

Debugging support

All of the capabilities that we have introduced in previous previews of Visual Studio 2015 are also available for Windows universal apps including the new diagnostic tools, XAML UI debugging and all of the profiling tools.  Together, these tools make debugging and diagnosing your Windows apps easier than ever.

.NET Native

With Windows 10, all .NET apps will be compiled with .NET Native by the Windows Store before being delivered to devices. As previously described, apps compiled with .NET Native will have a faster startup time and smaller memory footprint. This preview allows you to compile and run your .NET apps with the .NET Native toolchain on Window 10 PCs and Phones.

Windows Desktop applications

All of your Windows Desktop applications (WPF, Windows Forms, Win32) continue to work on Windows 10 without any changes. With the Visual Studio 2015 tool for Windows 10 you can now leverage the new Windows 10 APIs in your Win32 applications. Windows 10 also comes pre-installed with .NET Framework 4.6 which includes many new features including improvements in WPF and Windows Forms.

Application Insights integration

Gaining deep insights into the usage patterns of your application is key to its success in the market place. This release of Visual Studio integrates Application Insights with Windows 10 applications by default so that you can get telemetry for your applications easily via the Microsoft Azure portal.  Application Insights offers deep visualizations and insights into the usage patterns of your applications. Read more about getting started with Application Insights in your Windows applications here.

Summary

This is an early preview of the Windows 10 tools for Visual Studio 2015, and a good opportunity to test drive the new Windows 10 Technical Preview tools.  If you aren’t already a Windows Insider, sign up today to get access to the tools and the Windows 10 Technical Preview. Then try out the tools and send us your feedback via the Visual Studio Connect site, Send-a-Smile or the on Windows tools forums.

Namaste!

This week at EclipseCon we had the opportunity to talk with Java developers about some of the areas where we are bringing key Microsoft developer and platform services to Java development.  With increasingly heterogeneous development organizations, teams, and applications, it is more important than ever to have great tools that support the breadth of application development needs within a project. 

Here are a few of the areas we talked about this week for Java developers across Application Insights, Visual Studio Online, Team Foundation Server and Azure. 

Application Insights SDK for Java

Application Insights (currently available in preview) gives developers a 360 degree view of their application’s availability, performance and usage.  By adding simple agent SDKs into each component of an application, critical telemetry is collected across the application and aggregated into actionable data and insights in the Azure portal.

This week we introduced the Java SDK for Application Insights, a fully featured Application Insights agent for Java applications.  Even better, this SDK is open source on GitHub, along with in-progress work on SDKs for Android, iOS, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby and WordPress.  Along with our recent acquisition of HockeyApp, these SDKs are part of our work to make Application Insights available across the widest possible range of application scenarios.

Visual Studio Online for Java Developers

Both Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online support Java development across planning, source control, collaboration, build, test and deployment.  Whether your teams develop in Java, .NET or in multiple languages, Visual Studio Online offers an open, cloud-hosted development hub and is free for up to 5 users.

For Java developers, Visual Studio Online fits into existing workflows - you can use popular IDEs such as Eclipse, build technologies such as Ant or Maven, source control systems such as Git and community integrations with tools such as Jenkins.  

This week we launched a new portal Java page on Visual Studio Online with resources for Java developers to get the most out of Visual Studio Online.

Azure Toolkit for Eclipse 

Microsoft Azure supports Java across a wide range of compute, data and application services.  The Azure Java developer center includes documentation, tutorials and resources for Java developers to get started with Azure.

Building upon the Azure SDK, the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse provides templates and functionality that allow Eclipse users to easily create, develop, configure, test, and deploy arbitrarily complex, multi-tier, highly available and scalable cloud services and applications to Microsoft Azure on OS X, Linux and Windows.  This week we released several significant updates to the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse.

Both the Azure SDK for Java and the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse are also open source on GitHub, and we encourage developers to join us in continuing to improve these tools.

Conclusion

We continue to expand our developer tools and services to address a broad base of heterogeneous developer scenarios for both Windows and .NET developers as well as developers targeting a range of other languages and operating systems.  This week we announced the next wave of support for Java development across Visual Studio Online, Azure and Application Insights.  We will continue to build on this support across our developer services in the coming months and years.

Namaste!

Since then, we’ve seen great adoption and usage of TypeScript across a wide range of projects and applications – from Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite to Mozilla’s Shumway project and the great Asana web application.  At the same time, the ecosystem of frameworks and tools partners around TypeScript has also grown quickly – from tools for Eclipse developed by Palantir to TypeScript support in JetBrains’ WebStorm and the over 700 developers who have contributed to the DefinitelyTyped project.

TypeScript + Angular 2

Today, we’re excited to talk about another great framework partner we are working with.

For the last several months, the Microsoft TypeScript and Google Angular teams have been working closely together. Today at ng-conf in Salt Lake City, the Angular and the TypeScript teams are unveiling the first fruits of that collaboration.  We’re excited to announce that we have converged the TypeScript and AtScript languages, and that Angular 2, the next version of the popular JavaScript library for building web sites and web apps, will be developed with TypeScript.

Working closely with a rich library like Angular has helped TypeScript to evolve additional language features that simplify end-to-end application development, including annotations, a way to add metadata to class declarations for use by dependency injection or compilation directives.

Even more than the language innovations and library that have been built by the two teams, I’m proud of the productive relationship and partnership we’ve built between the TypeScript and Angular teams. Both teams are looking forward to continuing to move TypeScript and JavaScript forward together in the future, including working with the ECMAScript standards body on the future of types in JavaScript.

Next Steps for TypeScript

Since the release of TypeScript 1.0 last year, the TypeScript team has been hard at work making further improvements to the language and tools.

• As the ECMAScript 6 standard solidifies, we’ve been adding ES6 syntax and features to TypeScript.
• We’ve also been building user-requested features, such as the ECMAScript 7 async/await to make writing asynchronous code dramatically easier.
• And we’ve continued to invest in our architecture, making common build tasks up to 4x faster than they were in TypeScript 1.0.

You’ll see the results of all this work in the upcoming TypeScript 1.5 and future versions.

In addition to the work on the language, we’ve continued to improve Visual Studio’s powerful environment for building TypeScript apps with type-supplemented IntelliSense, go to definition, refactor/rename, project templates to get you started, and integrated build support. If you have Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 or beyond, you have TypeScript already.

Conclusion

It’s great to see the continued growth in the TypeScript ecosystem, and I’m particularly excited to be partnering with Google’s Angular team to align our work on TypeScript and Angular 2.

You can learn more about today’s Angular announcements and keep up with TypeScript on GitHub .

Namaste!

GitHub is the home of a strong open source community, including hundreds of Microsoft projects, and students are a critical part of this community.  Recently, GitHub announced the GitHub Student Developer Pack, a collection of resources for students to get started with access to great developer tools and services offerings from dozens of partners. 

Today, GitHub and Microsoft are making Visual Studio Community 2013 available as part of the GitHub Student Developer Pack. 

Through the Student Pack, student developers can access Visual Studio, as well as great free offers for Azure and Visual Studio Online.

• Visual Studio:  All the tools, designers and debuggers you need for your next project – with support for web, mobile, desktop and cloud apps using C#, Node.js, Python, F#, VB and more.  Visual Studio 2013 Community is free for students and other non-enterprise developers.
• Visual Studio Online: Tools for planning, backlogs, tracking bugs and running builds and continuous integration – all in one place.  Visual Studio Online accounts are free for up to 5 users.
• Microsoft Azure:  Host apps in the cloud on a platform that supports any OS, any language and any framework.  Microsoft Azure subscriptions include 10 free web sites and 10 free mobile services.

That’s just the start though.  Students can also get free access to many more Microsoft tools and developer offerings through DreamSpark, including SQL Server, training courses and Windows Store developer accounts.  Along with the GitHub Student Developer Pack, we’re making it easy for students to discover and access the offerings available through DreamSpark.

Go ahead and get started today.

Namaste!