MVPs Explore Visual Studio 2013
11/13/2013
TypeScript Support in Visual Studio 2013
By Visual C# MVP Bill Wagner
I’m excited to see the expanded support for TypeScript in Visual Studio 2013. It represents several good changes relating to how Microsoft releases developer tools.
First of all, TypeScxript is nearing its 1.0 release. The current version is 0.9.1.1. There have been important milestones along the way, and TypeScript is maturing well. I’m impressed with what the team has done so far.
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By VS ALM MVP Esteban Garcia
One of the great new features of TFS 2013 is the addition of Git as a source code repository. Git is a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) that has gained a lot of popularity in the past few years. Git allows you and your team to work completely disconnected by keeping a copy of your source code locally, including all your change history. By doing this, you are able to commit your changes locally, do file comparisons, create branches, merge your code, and much more. Once you are ready to share your changes with the rest of the team, you are able to push your changes to the centralized Git repository contained in your TFS Server.
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11/12/2013
One ASP.NET – Welcome to the Web Development Buffet!
By ASP.NET MVP Jeffrey T. Fritz
Since the release of the ASP.NET MVC framework in 2009, web programming with .NET became something of a guessing game. A choice would need to be made at the beginning of any project – should the project be built with web forms or MVC? Developers were forced into a question akin to: “What toppings do you want on your pizza?” And really, what developer isn’t going to change their mind halfway into a slice and think something like: “I would have really like to have had some green peppers on this…” ASP.NET should not be like ordering a pizza, where you can’t change your mind one place your order. It should be more like a buffet: I’d like a little web forms with some MVC controllers and a WebAPI here and there. Microsoft has finally brought these components all together, and the result is One ASP.NET.
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What’s New in Graphics and Game Development in Visual Studio 2013
By Visual C++ MVP Michael B. McLaughlin
Hi, my name is Michael B. McLaughlin and I’m a Visual C++ MVP. I’d like to introduce you to several graphics and game development additions and improvements in Visual Studio 2013.
Remote Graphics Diagnostics
Graphics debugging on remote machines through Graphics Diagnostics is a feature that I’m sure many graphics and game developers have been yearning for (I know that I have). In Visual Studio 2012 you could remotely debug an application’s CPU code using the Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2012. If you wanted to remotely debug graphics, though, then you could only do so programmatically[i].
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11/11/2013
New in Visual Studio 2013 – Windows Azure Mobile Services Integration
By Client Development MVP John Garland
Windows Azure Mobile Services (aka Mobile Services) is a Windows Azure offering aimed at providing client apps with turnkey access to services that address many of the typical backend needs encountered by mobile applications. These include access to structured data storage, the ability to define server-side business logic that potentially includes integration with 3rd party services, user authentication and authorization, integrated support for push notifications, and support for scheduled script execution. The platform offers several scalability and pricing options which allow a service instance to either grow or contract to meet the needs of the client apps that make use of it, and like most parts of the Windows Azure ecosystem, the Mobile Services feature set is actively being evolved to include more features that address even more common application scenarios.
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11/8/2013
Code Maps in Visual Studio 2013
By Visual C# MVP Peter Bromberg
The Visual Studio Code Map feature is designed to help developers visualize relationships in code. The need for code maps will become clear when you are writing or debugging code and need to understand code relationships, particularly when getting involved in a new or unfamiliar codebase.
Channel 9 has an excellent streaming video that covers Code Maps here: https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Visual-Studio-2012-Premium-and-Ultimate-Overview/Visual-Studio-Ultimate-2012-Understanding-complex-code-with-Code-Map-ENU
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11/7/2013
Script References in Visual Studio 2013
By ASP.NET/IIS MVP James Chambers
Some of the gems that make Visual Studio the best development environment are so humble that you’re likely to miss them. The updates to script references, in my opinion, fall into that category while still improving on an already great feature of the product: IntelliSense for JavaScript.
A Little Background on IntelliSense
IntelliSense has been featured for nearly two decades now in Visual Studio’s lineage, dating back to 1996. Developers have become so accustomed to using it that when you
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11/6/2013
New Features in Blend for Visual Studio 2013
By Visual C# MVP Alvin Ashcraft
Developers have been building great user experiences with Blend since Expression Blend v1 was released in April 2007. With the release of Visual Studio 2012, Expression Blend became Blend for Visual Studio. Microsoft is now launching another release of the tool, Blend for Visual Studio 2013. Let’s take a tour of what’s new in this new Blend release.
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11/5/2013
Making Web Development Wonderful Again with Web Essentials
By Visual C# MVP Schabse Laks
Visual Studio is a fantastic development environment for .Net-based Windows and web projects. However, this view of Visual Studio overlooks one of its most useful features: the text editor. Visual Studio includes a powerful text editor that can easily be used to edit standalone files without a project.
Unlike competing development editors such as Sublime, Visual Studio maintains a full-featured parse tree as you edit each file. This allows VS to provide unparalleled auto-completion and document-based actions, and can make the development experience much faster and more pleasant. These features are especially powerful in HTML and CSS documents.
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11/3/2013
Three Top Features That Will Help Improve Your Productivity with Visual Studio 2013
By ASP.NET MVP Patrick Desjardins
Visual Studio 2013 is packaged with a lot of new features. Three of them will be your next best friend. Not only are they easy to use but they don’t require a lot of deep configuration to activate. We will discuss enhanced debugging that shows the return value, the possibility of rapid access to the code that is used anywhere in the code editor window and how to improve navigability inside your files.
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10/31/2013
EventSource Improvements Include Better Diagnostics for Diagnostics
By Visual Basic MVP Kathleen Dollard
Many of the improvements in .NET 4.5.1 are tactical – they improve how you do what you’re already doing now. But a seemingly small change to the EventSource class is strategic – it’s part of changing what you do. In the same way process has been a conversation over the last ten years, diagnostics will be a key strategic conversation for the next ten years. I’ll define diagnostics simply – understanding what’s happening in a badly behaved application, especially in production. Although there’s a lot of room to grow in the surrounding tooling, EventSource tracing will help you today and increase its impact as the tooling matures. The .NET 4.5.1 changes to EventSource make it truly ready to play the central role in your diagnostic game plan.
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10/29/013
Viewing your code through Visual Studio’s CodeLens
By Visual Studio ALM MVP Richard Banks
Wouldn’t it be nice if Visual Studio let you know if code was unit tested or not? What if it could let you know a change was going to break large amounts of other code? What if it could give you the back story on why a particularly nasty piece of code turned out the way it has?
Enter Visual Studio 2013’s new CodeLens; a tool to help you answer all those questions.
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10/24/2013
Getting started with Coded UI Testing for your Windows 8.1 Store Apps
By Visual Studio ALM MVP Mike Douglas
Now with the release of Windows 8.1 and Visual Studio 2013, Coded UI Tests can provide automated functional testing against the UI including not only the mouse and keyboard inputs, but also to verify that the gestures react properly.
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10/22/2013
Visual Studio 2013 Navigate To Improvements
By Visual Basic MVP Deborah Kurata
The Navigate To (or Ctrl+Comma) feature provides search-as-you-type support for code files, full file paths, and symbol names such as class names and member names. This feature was new in Visual Studio 2010, unchanged in Visual Studio 2012, and improved significantly in 2013.