Visual Studio 2013, ALM, and DevOps
Since launching Visual Studio 2012, we’ve been thrilled with the customer adoption and partner momentum we’ve seen. Visual Studio 2012 has been downloaded more than 4 million times, the fastest adoption of any Visual Studio release in the past. We’ve also delivered new value into Visual Studio 2012 through two VS Updates, VS2012.1 and VS2012.2, updates which are now being used on more than 60% of Visual Studio 2012 deployments. The functionality available in Visual Studio is further augmented by a robust ecosystem of extensions and integrated solutions, including almost 500 VSIP products in market, and more than 3900 products and extensions for Visual Studio in the Visual Studio Gallery.
Not only have we seen great adoption on the client, in the cloud we’ve continued to see terrific uptake of Team Foundation Service, which we released for general availability at Build 2012 and which we’ve been updating approximately every three weeks with new capabilities, including with Git support as announced in January at the ALM Summit.
Even with this progress, there are many great opportunities to advance the state of the art for developers and development teams building modern apps and managing the modern app lifecycle. With multi-year release cycles vanishing and being replaced by shorter build/measure/learn cycles, development teams are more earnestly incorporating operations and other stakeholders into the development process. Modern application lifecycle management practices enable teams to support a continuous delivery cadence that balances agility and quality, while removing the traditional silos separating developers from operations and business stakeholders, improving communication and collaboration within development teams, and driving connections between applications and business outcomes. Microsoft is extending the ALM capabilities we’ve built into Visual Studio 2012 and its updates by further enabling such “DevOps” scenarios with our tools and services, yielding a more friction-free and higher quality path to production.
In this vein, today marks the start of TechEd North America 2013, and with it I’m excited to announce several key advances related to the modern application lifecycle.
Visual Studio 2013
I’m thrilled to share that our next major release, Visual Studio 2013, will be available later this year, with a preview build publicly available at Build 2013 in San Francisco at the end of the month. In his keynote demo and follow-on foundational session today at TechEd, Brian Harry highlighted some of the new ALM capabilities coming in this release and in the cloud, including new features focused on business agility, quality enablement, and DevOps. Here are a few of my favorites:
- Agile portfolio management, which enables you to plan your agile projects “at scale” by showing the hierarchical relationship between work being done in multiple teams across your organization.
- Cloud-based load testing, a new capability of Team Foundation Service that takes advantage of the elastic scalability of Windows Azure to generate traffic, simulating thousands of simultaneous virtual users so as to help you understand how your web applications and services operate under load.
- Code information indicators that provide information about unit tests, work items, code references, and more, all directly within the code editor in Visual Studio, increasing developer productivity by enabling project-related contextual information to be viewed and consumed without leaving the editor.
- A team room integrated into TFS, improving the collaboration amongst team members via a real-time and persistent chat room that integrates with data and interactions elsewhere in TFS.
- Identity integrated into Visual Studio, such that the IDE is connected to backend services that support, for example, roaming the developer’s settings as the developer moves from installation to installation.
- Support in TFS for integrated code comments that facilitate code reviews with increased transparency and traceability.
- A .NET memory dump analyzer, which enables developers to easily explore .NET objects in a memory dump and to compare two memory dumps in pursuit of finding and fixing memory leaks.
- Git support built into Visual Studio 2013, both on the client and on the server, including in the on-premises Team Foundation Server 2013.
These are just a few of the new capabilities available with this release, which we’ll be talking much more about in the coming weeks and at Build. Many of these features are available starting today on Team Foundation Service.
InRelease
DevOps is an increasingly important part of application lifecycle management and is a growing area of interest as businesses need to develop and deploy quality applications at a faster pace. We continue to invest in improving the modern application lifecycle, with a particular focus on DevOps.
As part of this increased focus, today I’m excited to announce Microsoft’s agreement to acquire InCycle’s InRelease Business Unit, a leading release management solution for .NET and Windows Server applications. InCycle’s InRelease product is a continuous delivery solution that automates the release process through all of your environments from TFS through to production, all in one solution, and all integrated with TFS.
This acquisition will extend Microsoft’s offerings in the ALM and DevOps space. We look forward to continuing to offer customers new tools and capabilities to help them develop and operate the high quality applications and services they need to run their businesses with increasing agility.
MSDN and Dev/Test on Windows Azure
The technical improvements we’re making to Visual Studio represent just one facet of the work we’re doing to improve the productivity and success of teams using Microsoft platforms.
For example, we’ve improved the Windows Azure benefit available as part of eligible MSDN subscriptions; you now have a choice as to how you use your Windows Azure credits for development and test, whether you apply them for Virtual Machines, Web Sites, Cloud Services, Mobile Services, Media Services, HDInsight, or beyond. The Windows Azure MSDN benefit includes access to virtual machine images preconfigured with MSDN subscription software, such as SQL Server and BizTalk Server, and alternatively supports uploading your own virtual machine with your MSDN software.
Further, one of our goals is to make it easy for every member of a development team, whether dev or test, to be empowered to provision without friction the environments they need when they need them. With the new Windows Azure MSDN benefit for dev and test, we are taking an important step towards realizing that goal. As of June 1st, MSDN subscribers now have use rights to run in Windows Azure VMs selected software they get through MSDN (see the Visual Studio and MSDN licensing white paper for more details).
These improvements help to make development teams more agile by providing them with simple and scalable access to development and test cloud-based resources.
Namaste!
Follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ssomasegar.
Comments
Anonymous
June 02, 2013
This all looks very cool. And is there a new .NET framework version with this release. Any new C# features?...Anonymous
June 02, 2013
That cool! 2008 --> 2010 --> 2012 --> and now 2013 --> this much earlier. .Anonymous
June 03, 2013
Good idea with VS release per year. But there are some questions:
- .NET and languages will be upgraded also per year or less frequently ?
- Do you plan to lower prices for VS Pro ? Spending 500$ per year is not good idea. I suggest to merge separate Express editions (web/desktop/store) into single VS Express.
Anonymous
June 03, 2013
Hi All, Yes. There will be a release of .NET that aligns with Visual Studio 2013 and more details will be announced in the Build conference. There are no pricing details being disclosed today. Cheers, Lisa Feigenbaum Visual StudioAnonymous
June 03, 2013
Can't wait to hear what additional C++ 11 support Herb will be announcing for Visual Studio 2013 at BUILD. Hope you folks will be able to sneak some early C++ 14 features in, not least std::make_unique (for which we badly need a canonical version) etc.Anonymous
June 03, 2013
does it mean that vs2012 will not get other features of C++11?Anonymous
June 03, 2013
But what about VS 2013 and C++11 support? Does this mean that Nov. CTP C++ compiler is now part of VS 2013 and there will be no update for VS 2012 ? dreaming Or will VS 2013 finally get full C++11 support ?Anonymous
June 03, 2013
Not a single C++ reference?! So much for the "going native" talk.Anonymous
June 04, 2013
I assume this means the C++11 improvements from the november CTP are no longer scheduled for a VS2012 update? The more things change, the more they stay the same...Anonymous
June 04, 2013
@Tom Kirby-Green, Alex, Tom, Moondevil, jay: Thanks for your interest in C++. With the announcements at TechEd 2013, only a subset of the capabilities and new features in Visual Studio 2013 have been discussed thus far, namely some of those in the application lifecycle management space. There is much more to the release than has been described thus far, and we will have much more information to share about the new release at Build 2013 in a few weeks.Anonymous
June 04, 2013
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June 04, 2013
What's next Visual Studio 2014 - JUNE then Visual Studio 2014 - September Then Visual Studio 2014 - October Then Visual Studio 2014 - October 15th I mean I'm all for upgrades and the like, but haven't they considered the time it takes for corporations (not small one or two developer shops) to authorize / purchase / upgrade / port existing projects / etc into their release roadmap?Anonymous
June 04, 2013
Bring back the colours in the interface, the 2012 visual studio interface lacks character, and as somebody who is colour orientated i have to stop and think about what button i am clicking in the tool bar. It took many years to get nice colour displays, now you think you can move back to grey-scale, this is not right, it is the worst interface i have ever seen.Anonymous
June 04, 2013
Very frustrating - we've have a hard time getting the organisation to purchase VS2012, as they don't "get" the benefits of up to date developer tools. We've finally purchased them only to find they'll be outdated in a few months time.Anonymous
June 04, 2013
After 10 years of .net development I am thrilled how buggy, unstable and unusable VS2012 is. Please look at Microsoft Connect feedback before writing posts like this.Anonymous
June 04, 2013
Very exciting, particularly looking forward to seeing what's new in C# and .Net :)Anonymous
June 04, 2013
I agree with Daniel. The reason I have not upgraded to VS 2012 is the terrible interface. Without colour, the icons all begin to look alike at 03:00 after a heavy night of development. A bit of colour would alleviate this.Anonymous
June 04, 2013
@Jason & Daniel, Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 has an extra theme, which restores the appearance of 2010, may solve your upgrade woes :)Anonymous
June 04, 2013
14 years late and I bet it still won't have a working C99 environmentAnonymous
June 04, 2013
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June 04, 2013
And what about Windows XP support? will that continue to be ignored?Anonymous
June 05, 2013
I would be happy if the mess that is the options dialog was redesigned and re-sizable. Ever tried moving settings from release to debug? Oh well I guess fixing the development environment is not as important as ticking off a laundry list of new features....Anonymous
June 05, 2013
Back in this post (blogs.msdn.com/.../the-road-to-visual-studio-11-beta-and-net-4-5-beta.aspx) you indicated that you were building for the 100 million developers that are the hobbyist and such... And that the 10 Million professional developers are now just a slice of the whole. Well, with VS 2012 about done and having only gotten 4 Million downloads... was it worth messing up the UI so much that you lost 7 Million of your professional developers in a fit of rage. All so you could gain 1 million hobbyist? (That will make you some random "fart" apps?) Really, I use Visual Studio 2012, but every time I need to go back to older versions of Visual Studio, I think to myself "Wow, this is a great UI". I don't often think that when coming back to Visual Studio 2012.Anonymous
June 05, 2013
I don't see how these features deserve a new Visual Studio. Just a pack of useless management tools to me. As a C++/C# developper it looks disapointing. No new .NET or WPF, no C++11 when clang and gcc are way ahead of Microsoft. Where is the cool stuff ?Anonymous
June 05, 2013
@Elviswong: As I mentioned in my previous comment, with the announcements at TechEd 2013 this week, only a subset of the capabilities and new features in Visual Studio 2013 have been discussed thus far, namely some of those in the application lifecycle management space. There is much more to the release than has been described thus far, and we will have much more information to share about the new release at Build 2013 in a few weeks.Anonymous
June 05, 2013
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June 05, 2013
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June 05, 2013
I have just finished installing VS 2012 and got this news of 2013! There is just no need for another version at this point in time. All the above features can be updated in VS 2012 Update 3.Anonymous
June 06, 2013
Is VS2013 going to see a viable replacement for deployment projects? If not, forget it!Anonymous
June 06, 2013
would love to share itAnonymous
June 06, 2013
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June 07, 2013
Well, only one Question? Since November 2012 CTP1, Herb Sutter calls this C++ 11. Are some People by Microsoft who use C++ 11 with Visual Studio, or dou all People in the developer devision working with the Notepad Clone like a Man called S.T.L.....Anonymous
June 10, 2013
It's a good think MSFT is getting out of the software business and positioning themselves as a hardware provider. There's a reason nobody wants Windows 8. Windows 7 and XP work 'just fine'. And so it was with VS 2010 - it worked just fine. But of course the hype drove everyone to download 2012. But the hype was just hype, Win8 was stillborn. And now you guys are pushing another version of VS? What? Why? Because you needed something to do for the last 2 years? Criminey - go build a rocket or something.Anonymous
June 10, 2013
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June 11, 2013
Congratz...Anonymous
June 12, 2013
@Reng-EDV, hoping that I understood your question right:-) Most folks on the VS team use Visual Studio including those who use C++11. When we released the C++11 CTP, there was no IDE support (e.g. intelisense) for some of the C++11 features but we have added such support in this release. If you need more info or have more questions, please feel free to contact me directly at "aymans at microsoft dot com"Anonymous
June 19, 2013
I am just crossing my fingers that the new .Net isn't just all about making Javascript more prominent. It's already bad enough that Win8 documentation seems to push JS, but if the .Net platform starts becoming more like it, I'm going to have to start looking into returning to Java.Anonymous
June 24, 2013
which is version of .Net with vs2013Anonymous
June 26, 2013
FYI - Python is included in VS2013 as well! See http://pytools.codeplex.com (disclaimer, etc).Anonymous
June 26, 2013
If you're serious about DevOps, build a better PowerShell environment. Forget Visual Studio.Anonymous
June 26, 2013
will there be a cheaper upgrade from vs 2012 users?Anonymous
June 27, 2013
Have you fixed the test-running system yet? Even in the latest 2012 version it is nearly useless.Anonymous
August 11, 2013
What is the target release date for Visual Studio 2013 ?