Here is my quick take on the announcements made at the VSConnect conference.
Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime. Very cool direction that Microsoft is taking. But in reality it’s not g have a big impact on me as I’m already fully invested in developing on Windows. I hope to see some good contributions though.
http://news.microsoft.com/2014/11/12/microsoft-takes-net-open-source-and-cross-platform-adds-new-development-capabilities-with-visual-studio-2015-net-2015-and-visual-studio-online/
http://microsoft.github.io
Microsoft is committing to bring.NET to Linux and Mac.Yet again very nice direction Microsoft is heading, will give me a wider audience for the stuff I develop, and I have already seen comments on twitter like “Now I only need to write F#” – which is a pretty good thing
Visual Studio Update 4. Hardly an announcement but hey, I have already installed the CTP and it’s working better than ever, so I’m not complaining
http://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2013-update4-rtm-vs
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/11/12/opening-up-visual-studio-and-net-to-every-developer-any-application-net-server-core-open-source-and-cross-platform-visual-studio-community-2013-and-preview-of-visual-studio-2015-and-net-2015.aspx
Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015. The new version of Visual Studio looks super promising. The whole vNext development story it brings is going to be exciting to dig into. Many improvements are implemented in order to support vNext (.NET 2015) like new Nuget package manager UI, better JSON support and support for tools like Bower, Gulp and Grunt. The new version of Visual Studio also brings some core improvements. From what I saw, the debugging experience is getting some love as well, it gets support for LINQ in intermediate window and the other debug windows, and it will have a built-in performance profiler that shows time taken on each line when stepping from line to line.
It was also surprising to me that they announced that .NET from now on will be versioned by year (and I guess possibly month and day), I look forward to see how that is going to work out. The reason behind this shift away from the traditional version numbering is to allow for a faster cadence of release to the runtime.
http://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/visual-studio-2015-downloads-vs
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingNET2015NETAsOpenSourceNETOnMacAndLinuxAndVisualStudioCommunity.aspx
A new version of Visual Studio named Community Edition. This version is a free version with the same capabilities as Visual Studio Professional. The catch is the version can only be used by small teams up to 5 developers, non-profit work or open source projects. For a single developer that is allowed to use it for shipping non-free apps in the various app store it is a big step up from the Web Edition that previously was the only free version.
http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs
Benefits for MSDN subscribers. A nice thing for all MSDN subscribers is that they now gain access to some the learning material at pluralsight. I can’t find a link to this announcement but the pluralsight lists these courses as a benefit to MSDN subscribers: http://support.pluralsight.com/knowledgebase/articles/456830-which-courses-are-included-with-the-benefit
Announcement for Visual Studio Online. Visual Studio Online also received some attention, the most exciting things was better ALM support, search across in all source files, easier creation of build definitions, history for build definitions. The possibility to use VS Online to build github repos and use the ALM features of VS Online in combination. Finally they showed announced a new build agent that can run on Linux and Mac, so you can build those cross platform projects with VS Online.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2014/11/12/news-from-connect.aspx