Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 announcements from Build and TechEd

Over the past few weeks it’s been one of many exciting announcements across the Build and TechEd conferences in the world of Visual Studio and I thought I would post some summaries so that you can drill in for more information. If you still want further details, full conference keynote and session videos are available if you tune to Channel 9 (Build 2013, TechEd North America 2013 & TechEd Europe 2013).

Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 (2012.3)

Firstly for the existing 2012 tools we have now released our third update (2012.3) delivering a number of updates to the Visual Studio 2012 products including some forward compatibility updates that will be important in interoperability with Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1. You can download this from here.

Visual Studio 2013 Preview

At the Build conference along with the Preview of Windows 8.1 we have now shipped a preview of Visual Studio 2013 which you can download from here. This update includes an update to .NET (4.5.1) which will ship with Windows 8.1.

Soma has written a great summary of the Visual Studio and .NET tools that are realised in this release. I recommend you check out here.

There’s some truly amazing features here that will improve development productivity and runtime performance.

Application Lifecycle Management Tooling (VS2013, TFS 2013 and Team Foundation Service)

Over TechEd and Build many of the new Application Lifecycle Management features arriving across Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server/Service have been announced.

Brian Harry has written a great overview of these features here.

I know many of my customers have been looking forwards to the Git source control and agile features in this release (on and off-premise), and I think adding new collaboration features like Team Rooms will really help team transparency with a timeline view of activity. Finally with the acquisition of InRelease, TFS will better support flexible release management scenarios.