To support “write once, run anywhere” application development on new Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Update 1, Microsoft announced the release of the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. This update aligns with recent Microsoft products and supports the new features of Windows 8.1 Update 1 and Windows Phone 8.1.

Last November, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2013 and committed to delivering more to developers with Azure integration. Compared with the first update, it includes a number of functional innovations and most notably “universal Windows apps” development, which uses the Windows Runtime to build apps that will run on Windows Phone 8.1, Windows 8.1 and even Xbox One.

Microsoft also wants its Visual Studio to embrace Azure. This means that developers can conveniently add or remove instances or servers as they require, without needing to exit the Visual Studio environment. For developers who are already building apps on the Azure platform, VS 2013 portal will give them an end-to-end solution for almost all of the tools they need to develop, deploy and manage their apps.

Universal Apps for Windows and Windows Phone

With an update of Visual Studio 2013 to the Update 2 RC development environment Microsoft gives developers the ability to use to optimize an app for all Windows platforms–whether PC, Smartphone or Tablet. In Visual Studio, Microsoft introduced a notion of shared projects for C#, C++ and JavaScript, making sharing code and assets between the Windows and Windows Phone heads of the same app as easy as possible.

In addition to new features for productivity and collaboration, the update includes the “Shared Projects” that allow you to develop an app suitable for smartphones, tablets and PCs. Developers can decide to make the app only once and can be installed on multiple devices. The universal app will be identified with an icon depicting a smartphone superimposed on a computer. Developers are free to seek pay the one-time download of the app or any application on a device by the customer.

Universal app Windows will reduce development time, as developers will only need to make small changes to the interface, integrate support for mouse and keyboard on a desktop, and controller and Kinect on Xbox One.

“Universal projects allow developers to use approximately 90 percent of the same code, a single packaging system, and a common user interface to target apps for phones, tablets and PCs,” Microsoft said in a press release.

New tools and APIs for building seamless apps

The suite of tools in Visual Studio for Windows Store development can all be used during development, debugging and diagnostics for Windows Phone 8.1 projects. VS 2013 Update 2 introduces new APIs that allow developers to easily create applications that target Windows platforms. Windows Phone applications can now use Windows Runtime.

With Visual Studio 2013, it will be possible to create WinRT applications for Windows Phone using C#/XAML, C++/XAML, C++/DirectX and JavaScript/HTML. API Speech has been updated to integrate with the new voice assistant Cortana, which was introduced in Windows Phone. Developers can use to integrate all the services offered by Cortana in their applications, including the triggering of certain actions via voice commands.

Microsoft also introduced a new CPU Usage diagnostic tool that lets developers do real-time monitoring of the operation of the processor during the execution of programs. The update also has a Memory Usage tool to allow developers to monitor live the way their applications consume memory. These diagnostic tools (profiler memory, responsiveness of the user interface, consumption energy) can be used during development and debugging Windows Phone 8.1 applications.

Microsoft also announced the publication of the pre-release of .NET Native Compilation, which combines the productivity of C# and .NET, with performance characteristics of the native code. The .NET Native is a new compiler optimizations that leverages the C+ + compiler from Microsoft to produce native image with gains in startup time, memory usage and performance.

This update also includes the final Typescript 1.0, the superset of JavaScript developed by the open source division of Microsoft. The Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC also contains update to NuGet version 2.8.1, Entity Framework 6.1, as well as many other updates, fixes and improvements to the Windows Phone 8.1 platform, ASP.NET technology and Windows Azure.

Visual Studio Online

At Build, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio Online, a Web-based version of Visual Studio, had exited a period of testing and was now available to all comers. Microsoft promised to be a high degree of reliability with the GA release and said Visual Studio Online comes with an SLA of 99.9 percent for account services and functionalities.

As the name might suggest, Visual Studio Online is not a complete online version of the Visual Studio development environment. Rather, it is a distributed version control system and the successor to the Team Foundation Service. The online development tool focuses primarily on projects in the cloud and was launched in November as a preview version.

Microsoft says the online cloud tool would provide everything a DevOps team needs to do modern cloud based development. It has the capabilities to provision dev and test resources, development and collaboration capabilities, build, release and deployment capabilities, application telemetry and management capabilities and more.