A little over a year after the release of Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft officially launched the 2013 version of its Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) with most of the features were already discovered in preview mode last month.

The development environment Visual Studio 2013 officially arrives with its major developments including the reinforcement of the frame DevOps. Using Visual Studio 2013, developers will have more opportunities to create advanced applications for all platforms and devices in the shortest possible time.

Microsoft also unveiled a cloud-based version of Visual Studio. Visual Studio Online offers developers to launch several new services that are running on the Windows Azure cloud platform. They are intended to complement the client version of Visual Studio Integrated Desktop Environment (IDE).

According to Microsoft, Visual Studio 2013 and. NET 4.5.1 is available immediately worldwide. MSDN subscribers have access to the new 2013 versions since the release to manufacturing in October.

More DevOps

Microsoft continues to improve DevOps aspects of its FDI field on which it focuses for several versions. Enabling greater ease in the adoption of DevOps practices to establish a close collaboration between developers and IT operations teams.

Visual Studio Professional 2013 allows developers to analyze code with tools for application debugging and profiling and develop. The code quality can be tested with unit tests, and an extensible test framework. The Team Foundation component service is designed to help developers to share their code in a team and to plan and implement software projects together. Team Foundation Service is available for free for up to five users.

With Visual Studio 2013, Microsoft brings not only an altered license model, but also a number of technical innovations. According to Microsoft, this includes the synchronization of settings that define preview, improvements in debugging and advanced features for application lifecycle management.

VS 2013 contains a connected and enhanced integrated development environment with innovative features to improve developer productivity, additional tools to support application development for Windows 8.1, web development, and improve the debugging and optimization of the executable and managed code.

Visual Studio 2013 also provides a significant number of new features: improvements to the editor with the new Peek and CodeLens; diagnostic tools for user interface, memory consumption and even energy consumption of major updates for Web developers, new ALM capabilities, deep integration with Git and better agile portfolio management.

Deep Azure integration

Visual Studio 2013 allows developers to build modern applications that leverage the cloud to target a wide range of devices and user experiences while being delivered in accordance with the rapid life cycle and dynamic applications today.

With the release of Visual Studio 2013 Microsoft also announced the availability of the online version of Visual Studio Online. Developers have the ability to use cloud services hosted in Windows Azure, and apply integrated scenarios for creating, deploying, and managing applications. New tools include a in preliminary version of Visual Studio Online include “Monaco” – simplified code editor in a browser; Visual Studio Online Application Insights – tool for analyzing performance of applications and Release Management tools that enable you to manage the implementation.

“Visual Studio Online enables full synchronization context and the configuration between different workstations and client machines. It is also possible to easily retrieve the source code shared locally, but also to manage builds with Git,” says S. Somasegar, vice president of the Developer Division of Microsoft.

Developers can also run CI builds in the cloud infrastructure from Microsoft. The programming environment “Monaco” in the browser gives developers access to some of the Visual Studio features. It should enable the processing of Azure Web sites directly from a modern Browser. Monaco has been developed according to information from Microsoft for a period of three years. It’ll already used for other cloud offerings, including the Napa developer tools for Office 365 and the file processing in SkyDrive.

Taking into HTML and CSS support, Visual Studio Online Monaco provides the main code editor features. It also supports JavaScript, but typescript an over-all very typical of JavaScript improving classroom management, error detection and auto-completion. Visual Studio Online Monaco is certainly the leading provider of 100% online code created by Microsoft. An initiative that joined the Eclipse around the Orion project.

Cross platform

Microsoft also announced with the release of Visual Studio 2013 a partnership with Xamarin, the latter to develop native mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows from the same code. For those who do not know, Xamarin is a solution that allows you to create mobile apps on iOS and Android using C# and. NET as if they were applications for Windows or Windows Phone.

The agreement, both technical and commercial, will provide access to Xamarin technology within Visual Studio. Xamarin is fully integrated with the planned portable libraries from Microsoft, facilitating the sharing of code between terminals.

For Microsoft, the. NET was focused exclusively on Windows. Partnering with Xamarin marks a change, an attempt to expand its development platform to other operating systems, and that is something provide good results for developers and users.

Microsoft said defining a strategy to create and update applications must take account of market trends. The most important of them today – the growth of the number of devices, a tremendous increase in the volume of big data that should govern the application, as well as the rapid development of cloud technologies. Visual Studio 2013 meets all these requirements, providing developers with tools that let you create high-quality software and implement their ideas, even from a modern browser.