Visual Studio 2013, ALM, and DevOps

Since launching Visual Studio 2012, we’ve been thrilled with the customer adoption and partner momentum we’ve seen.  Visual Studio 2012 has been downloaded more than 4 million times, the fastest adoption of any Visual Studio release in the past.  We’ve also delivered new value into Visual Studio 2012 through two VS Updates, VS2012.1 and VS2012.2, updates which are now being used on more than 60% of Visual Studio 2012 deployments. The functionality available in Visual Studio is further augmented by a robust ecosystem of extensions and integrated solutions, including almost 500 VSIP products in market, and more than 3900 products and extensions for Visual Studio in the Visual Studio Gallery.

Not only have we seen great adoption on the client, in the cloud we’ve continued to see terrific uptake of Team Foundation Service, which we released for general availability at Build 2012 and which we’ve been updating approximately every three weeks with new capabilities, including with Git support as announced in January at the ALM Summit.

Even with this progress, there are many great opportunities to advance the state of the art for developers and development teams building modern apps and managing the modern app lifecycle.  With multi-year release cycles vanishing and being replaced by shorter build/measure/learn cycles, development teams are more earnestly incorporating operations and other stakeholders into the development process.  Modern application lifecycle management practices enable teams to support a continuous delivery cadence that balances agility and quality, while removing the traditional silos separating developers from operations and business stakeholders, improving communication and collaboration within development teams, and driving connections between applications and business outcomes.  Microsoft is extending the ALM capabilities we’ve built into Visual Studio 2012 and its updates by further enabling such “DevOps” scenarios with our tools and services, yielding a more friction-free and higher quality path to production.

In this vein, today marks the start of TechEd North America 2013, and with it I’m excited to announce several key advances related to the modern application lifecycle.

Visual Studio 2013

I’m thrilled to share that our next major release, Visual Studio 2013, will be available later this year, with a preview build publicly available at Build 2013 in San Francisco at the end of the month.  In his keynote demo and follow-on foundational session today at TechEd, Brian Harry highlighted some of the new ALM capabilities coming in this release and in the cloud, including new features focused on business agility, quality enablement, and DevOps.  Here are a few of my favorites:

  • Agile portfolio management, which enables you to plan your agile projects “at scale” by showing the hierarchical relationship between work being done in multiple teams across your organization.
  • Cloud-based load testing, a new capability of Team Foundation Service that takes advantage of the elastic scalability of Windows Azure to generate traffic, simulating thousands of simultaneous virtual users so as to help you understand how your web applications and services operate under load.
  • Code information indicators that provide information about unit tests, work items, code references, and more, all directly within the code editor in Visual Studio, increasing developer productivity by enabling project-related contextual information to be viewed and consumed without leaving the editor.
  • A team room integrated into TFS, improving the collaboration amongst team members via a real-time and persistent chat room that integrates with data and interactions elsewhere in TFS.
  • Identity integrated into Visual Studio, such that the IDE is connected to backend services that support, for example, roaming the developer’s settings as the developer moves from installation to installation.
  • Support in TFS for integrated code comments that facilitate code reviews with increased transparency and traceability.
  • A .NET memory dump analyzer, which enables developers to easily explore .NET objects in a memory dump and to compare two memory dumps in pursuit of finding and fixing memory leaks.
  • Git support built into Visual Studio 2013, both on the client and on the server, including in the on-premises Team Foundation Server 2013.

These are just a few of the new capabilities available with this release, which we’ll be talking much more about in the coming weeks and at Build.  Many of these features are available starting today on Team Foundation Service.

InRelease

DevOps is an increasingly important part of application lifecycle management and is a growing area of interest as businesses need to develop and deploy quality applications at a faster pace. We continue to invest in improving the modern application lifecycle, with a particular focus on DevOps.

As part of this increased focus, today I’m excited to announce Microsoft’s agreement to acquire InCycle’s InRelease Business Unit, a leading release management solution for .NET and Windows Server applications. InCycle’s InRelease product is a continuous delivery solution that automates the release process through all of your environments from TFS through to production, all in one solution, and all integrated with TFS.

This acquisition will extend Microsoft’s offerings in the ALM and DevOps space. We look forward to continuing to offer customers new tools and capabilities to help them develop and operate the high quality applications and services they need to run their businesses with increasing agility.

MSDN and Dev/Test on Windows Azure

The technical improvements we’re making to Visual Studio represent just one facet of the work we’re doing to improve the productivity and success of teams using Microsoft platforms.

For example, we’ve improved the Windows Azure benefit available as part of eligible MSDN subscriptions; you now have a choice as to how you use your Windows Azure credits for development and test, whether you apply them for Virtual Machines, Web Sites, Cloud Services, Mobile Services, Media Services, HDInsight, or beyond.  The Windows Azure MSDN benefit includes access to virtual machine images preconfigured with MSDN subscription software, such as SQL Server and BizTalk Server, and alternatively supports uploading your own virtual machine with your MSDN software.

Further, one of our goals is to make it easy for every member of a development team, whether dev or test, to be empowered to provision without friction the environments they need when they need them.  With the new Windows Azure MSDN benefit for dev and test, we are taking an important step towards realizing that goal. As of June 1st, MSDN subscribers now have use rights to run in Windows Azure VMs selected software they get through MSDN (see the Visual Studio and MSDN licensing white paper for more details).

These improvements help to make development teams more agile by providing them with simple and scalable access to development and test cloud-based resources.

Namaste!

Follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ssomasegar.