Visual Studio 2013 Released

The latest release of our Visual Studio Product has just been released, 2013. With this release you will see some cool new features, including:

  • Better support for multiple frameworks within one application, MVC, ASP etc
  • Better integration with Azure Active Directory
  • Responsive design features
  • Better support for HTML5 and JavaScript frameworks
  • Better cross-browser support
  • Scaffolding across all project types.
  • A new identity framework with support for using Azure Tables
  • A new version of SignalR which adds real-time functionality to applications, with support for Android and iOS apps
  • Entity framework improvements

Personally I love the improved integration with Azure AD which means you can easily create a cloud based identity provider for all of your applications, integrate this with On-Premise and you have simple SSO for LOB apps hosted in the cloud and internally.

I also like the fact that we can have multiple frameworks within a project, MVC, ASP.NET etc. Forcing one or the other meant that most developers chose MVC when it may not have been most appropriate. So think about a website that requires HTML5 responsive design (MVC) but does have some complex forms too.

I also like the ability to integrate Azure Tables into the identity provider, NoSQL is a better option for this type of data and means website developers don’t have to provision a RDBMS just for login data.

You can get more detail on all of the new features at Scott’s blog:

https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/10/17/announcing-the-release-of-visual-studio-2013-and-great-improvements-to-asp-net-and-entity-framework.aspx