The Announcements made at the Connect(); Event

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November 12 has been a day of big announcements from the Visual Studio team. In a 2 day event called “Connect();”, Microsoft has announced that it will be open sourcing the full server-side .NET Core stack, from ASP.NET 5 down to the Core Runtime and Framework, and the open source .NET will be expanded to run on Linux and Mac OS X in addition to Windows.

On the tools-side we introduced Visual Studio Community 2013 which is a new, free and fully featured edition of Visual Studio, available today, with access to the full Visual Studio extensibility ecosystem and support for targeting any platform, from devices and desktop to web and cloud services. This version of the development tool, available at no cost is primarily targeted at independent developers, students, small companies and others not making enterprise applications.

An all new Visual Studio 2015 Preview edition is available with.NET 2015 Preview. Together, these bring industry-leading cross-platform mobile development tools, deep support for cloud development, and great productivity improvements across the breadth of the developer experience. Even if you’ve been following the earlier Visual Studio “14” CTPs, you’ll find some new things in here, including a new Visual Studio Emulator for Android and support for building Android applications. For testing Visual Studio 2015 Preview, there’s also an Azure VM image available in the Gallery.

At the same time, we are releasing Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 which including dozens of improvements across the product plus several great new features. Make sure to update your installation of Visual Studio 2013 today!

Visual Studio Online is expanding its DevOps portfolio with the new Visual Studio Online Release Management service and Visual Studio Cloud Deployment Projects.

For all the details and to see the recorded announcements and in-depth break-out sessions, head over to the Connect(); event coverage on Channel 9 and have a look at Soma Somasegar’s blog post and summary.