Visual Studio 2013 – Preview Release

Microsoft is breaching its traditional release cycle of two-year for Visual Studio – a software development platform. Visual Studio 2013 preview has arrived within less than a year after previous 2012 release. Visual Studio 2013 (VS 2013) is here in a preview release from few weeks.

Introducing Visual Studio 2013

Featuring new capabilities for cloud-based load testing, devops, team development, and TFS 2013. There are lots of new stuffs. Visual Studio 2013 features improvements to the Team Foundation Service (TFS) cloud-based ALM platform. Key features related to – Application Lifecycle are as follows:

Agile Portfolio Management

With Team Foundation Services (TFS) 2013, the problem of enabling larger organizations to manage their projects with teams using various approaches has been improved as compared to TFS 2012.  Unlike TFS 2012 tooling which is focused on individual teams and relies on Project, Project Server or combination of both and reporting integration to roll that up for larger organizations. TFS 2013 provides good opportunity with improve solutions to enable user at all levels of the organization to participate in a way that suits them most and a easy manner.

TFS 2013 tackles the problem of work breakdown. Different points in the organization care about different levels of granularity. TFS 2013 address this situation by introducing the notion of different levels of backlog. TFS 2013 lets you manage the backlog at each level and trace the relationships. It also offers multiple Scrum teams to manage their individual backlog of user tasks / stories that then pays to the same high-level backlog.

Version Control

Visual Studio 2013 comes with improved version control solution. A lot has been improved. VS 2013 Team Explorer comes with an added “Connect” page that makes it lot easier to manage various Team Projects you connect to – cloud, local, or enterprise.  Team Explorer home page is got new looks as well more visually appealing and provides access to unbelievably wonderful “home” from which you can navigate to whatever you want. So, as soon as you connect to Team Project, you just have to click on the solution you want to work on and switch between them easily.

Pop-out

Do you want your pending changes window to be separate? VS 2013 comes with Pop-out Team Explorer pages. You can dock ‘pending changes’ window anywhere you want – like in the old VS 2010 position on a different monitor or anything you like. You can “pop out” other pages too (like the build pages).  Though it’s not perfect yet.

Remember this is still just a preview and not the final version. The pending change page needs some more improvements and focus more on screen real estate on the file list. Also, we found that all pages cannot be popped out. We guess Microsoft will be fixing it with final release.

Lightweight Code Commenting

“Lightweight code commenting” is a new feature in web access experience that allows people to easily comment on code. It provides a wonderful inline experience for commenting either on whole files or on changes – somewhat similar to code review feature in Visual Studio Premium. It lacks all of the workflow features (requesting, creating or managing a code review etc.) than an actual code review practice would need. The two features use the same fundamental technologies for managing comments enabling them to work nice together but they aren’t yet really overlapping features.

Coding

VS 2013 help people slogging code. The new “heads up display” feature provides developer key insights into his code as he is working. VS 2013 got lot of “indicators” now and Microsoft will be adding more. It’s an innovative way for you to learn more about your code while you read/edit.

Memory diagnostics is another grate new capability in VS 2013. It has been designed particularly with a focus on allowing you to trace memory leaks in production. Capture memory “snapshot”, load it in Visual Studio and then explore the layer to understand what memory is being held on to. You can take two snapshots to compare them and see what objects changed.

Testing

VS/TFS 2013 comes with a new bunch of capabilities.  Both come with improved Web based test execution and test case management capabilities, which were introduced in VS 2012.

VS 2013 new test case management allows you to manage your test plans in more details and comprehensively without switching to the Test Professional client. You can now create and modify test plans, suites and shared steps on the web. It brings in better test editing tools. Now you can add step attachments, and use shared steps, and parameterizes step data and more. Also, new test running experience makes it easier to capture screenshots etc.

With brand new service “cloud load testing” you can now load test your apps without configuring any infrastructure. Just use Visual Studio 2013 (Ultimate Edition) to create a load test and point it at TFS and say Go! And shortly you have load test results for your app. This is especially valuable for people building Windows Azure apps and wants to verify the scalability of their apps before opening them to public or broad user base.

Release Management

Microsoft acquires InRelease – release management product from InCycle Software. This when added to VS 2103/TFS 2013 overall lifecycle solution will fill an important gap that sometimes slow down the teams. InRelease allows you to manage all of your in-flight releases. For each and every release you can define paths that have stages, acceptance criteria, approvals etc. And you can also define automated deployment pipeline for your each and every application.

Team Collaboration

TFS 2013  comes with a new feature called “Team Rooms”. A Team Room is a robust teamwork space that records everything up-to-the-minute that happens in your team. You can configure notifications – builds, check-ins, code reviews, etc to go into the Team Room and it becomes a living record of the activity in the project.

You can also have dialogues or chats with the rest of your team in the room. It’s always “on” and “permanently” recorded. Thus allowing folks to catch up on past happenings while they were away, go back and find previous conversations, etc. This severs to the core value propositions of Team Foundation Server of transparency by helping teams collaborate more effectively. It helps team to make better decisions by providing real time information on the happenings in the software development process.

Devops

For devops – development and operations, VS 2013 has been integrated with Microsoft System Center. Thus making it simpler and easer to get code re-installation by expert whenever problems appear. Microsoft is making devops more seamless experience.

At WeCT, we’re excited about the new features and ease of work it has to offer. We are eagerly waiting for our hands on the final release of Visual Studio 2013. We expect the final release in last quarter this year.

Keep watching and please share your views.