Build 2013: Visual Studio 2013 Preview Available Now

Today Steve Ballmer kicked of the //build conference in San Francisco CA and I am sure you can read all about it over the net. However despite the real cool new features mentioned for Windows 8.1 our main interest went into what’s new for Visual Studio 2013. Let’s face it no matter how cool an OS is, if you don’t have the apps and especially the tools for building apps, then it just remains a cool OS.

 

Not accidently Microsoft released a preview version of Visual Studio along with the preview version of Windows 8.1 and can be downloaded at https://preview.windows.com. Furthermore Somasegar Vice president of developer division at Microsoft has posted a blog explaining in more details what to expect from the new Visual Studio:

    • .NET 4.5.1 Preview with go live support improving on diagnostics and debugging support:
      • x64 support for Edit and Continue
      • More enhanced experience for async operation debugging
      • Same capability support for JS & C++
    • C++ 11 standard support which is big thing as you know C++ is a first citizen language in building Windows 8 apps.
    • Serious performance improvements to XAML developer experience (yes!) along with UI responsive toolset support and UI testing!
    • A better JS debugging experience overall making VS one of the best JS debugging tools out there
    • The really cool energy consumption tool, allowing you to measure how big your energy consumption is for the app you are developing

 

This is just the tip of the iceberg and I am sure more features will be announced later this week. You can find the full article here.

Try it out and let us know what you think about it.