Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 CTP2, Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 2 RC and TypeScript 1.0 RC
Today, we have released Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 CTP2, a go-live Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 2 RC and TypeScript 1.0 RC. Coming shortly on the heels of Update 1, this update release preview includes several significant feature additions as well as fixes. You can see full details in the release notes.
Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 will include new features across many parts of our tools when it is released this Spring. With today's preview, we're making available a subset of these features to early adopters. This includes support for TypeScript, updates to web tooling, improvements in diagnostics tools, and even easier Azure integration for Web projects.
Today's updates also include the release of Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 2 RC, with improvements including additional Git support and work item tagging from Visual Studio.
TypeScript
Today's TypeScript 1.0 RC release marks an important step on the path to 1.0. We are also now adding TypeScript support into the Visual Studio 2013 product, starting with Update 2.
TypeScript has been a hit with developers both inside and outside Microsoft as it's developed toward 1.0 over the last 18 months. Optional static typing, rich IDE features, and support for classes and modules provide foundations for robust software development for JavaScript developers.
TypeScript is today being used to build products all over Microsoft, including Visual Studio Online, XBox Music and Video, parts of Bing, and the IE11 Developer Tools. Outside of Microsoft, TypeScript is being used in projects like Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite. The open source community around TypeScript has developed great projects like IDE support for TypeScript in Eclipse and the DefinitelyTyped repository of JavaScript library typings for all of the most popular JavaScript libraries.
Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 2 RC
Today's go-live release of Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 2 RC includes many updates that have been made available to Visual Studio Online users over the last few months. This includes improvements to Git support, backlog management in TFS Web Access, support for tags throughout Visual Studio, improvements in lightweight charting and CodeLens support for incoming change indicators.
We continue to add to the Git support in Visual Studio and TFS. Update 2 now supports amending commits, pushing to multiple remotes and reverting a commit all within Visual Studio.
Work Item tagging has been a popular feature in TFS, and this update adds many of the most requested new capabilities for tagging, including querying on tags, editing tags from Visual Studio, and exporting tags to Excel.
TFS 2013 introduced lightweight charting, and in Update 2 we are making charts easier to use by supporting pinning to the home page and customizing colors.
Details of the TFS 2013 Update 2 are available on Brian Harry's blog.
Web Tools
Today's update brings many new features in the Web developer tools, including SCSS support and improvements to LESS, an improved URL picker across all web tools, and updated ASP.NET templates which use the most recent platform releases from ASP.NET and Entity Framework. Full details on the web tooling features in this update are available on the web development blog.
One simple but important new feature is a full-featured JSON editor, including colorization, formatting and warnings.
We've also added JSON support to the debugger:
Azure
Update 2 makes it easier than ever to take advantage of Azure during development. In Update 2, we provide options to auto-create an Azure Web Site and SQL Azure database at project creation time for simple deployment to a development/testing environment. This is especially important for MSDN subscribers who have monthly credits for Azure as part of MSDN.
Diagnostics
Update 2 adds several new features to IntelliTrace. Performance events now provide the ability to navigate to the actual user code for MVC methods, to jump to the SQL command for database queries, and there are other UI enhancements such as a hot path to the most expensive call. In addition, the .NET memory analysis feature from Visual Studio 2013 has been improved with the ability to inspect object instance details.
In Visual Studio 2013 we introduced several new diagnostics tools for Windows Store applications, including Energy Consumption analysis and a UI Responsive analysis. In Update 2, it is now possible to use a combination of these tools at the same time, and see combined diagnostics data on a shared timeline. This enables new insights on correlations between UI responsiveness, CPU utilization and power consumption.
Conclusion
There will be even more coming in Update 2 over the coming months, but today's CTP gives early adopters a chance to try out a handful of the new features. The RC releases of Team Foundation Server and TypeScript 1.0 are ready for developers today.
Namaste!
Comments
Anonymous
February 25, 2014
Still looks like ***Anonymous
February 25, 2014
Awesome! Thanks for the update. Installing it right now on my VS2013 Professional.Anonymous
February 25, 2014
Great!!!Anonymous
February 25, 2014
Did you bring back setup and deployment projects? Did you fix the GUI? Did you listen to user feedback? Did you act on user feedbeack?Anonymous
February 25, 2014
Did you fix the DesignTime Problems in WPF?Anonymous
February 26, 2014
I cannot open Windows Phone projects after updated. Is it a known bug?Anonymous
February 26, 2014
Your images have no alt text and so screen reader users have no idea what they are reading.Anonymous
February 26, 2014
@Nguyen - We just tried reproducing this the Windows Phone 8 issue on our end, but could not. What we tried is to install Visual Studio 2013 RTM Ultimate with the Windows Phone 8 tools selected, Visual Studio 2013 Update 1, and then Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 CTP2. After this sequence, we were still able to create and open Windows Phone 8 projects. If you can get in touch with me offline at unnir at Microsoft dot com, we can do further investigations on your setup. Thanks! Unni Program Manager, Visual StudioAnonymous
February 26, 2014
@Anonymous - Thanks for pointing this out, the images are updated now with alt text.Anonymous
February 26, 2014
BrowserLink appears to be broken (page won't update when css changes). Clicking the browser link button will also crash VS...Anonymous
February 27, 2014
@Guy, The CSS change feature is not part of Visual Studio, but is in Web Essentials. The current version (1.9) of Web Essentials is not compatible with Update 2 CTP 2, but we are working on releasing a new version this week.Anonymous
February 27, 2014
@Mads Gotcha, made me realize how useful that feature actually is :pAnonymous
February 27, 2014
I wonder if it wasn't for Google releasing Dart, TypeScript would even exist? (I have no interest in either)Anonymous
February 27, 2014
@Devil's Advocate - It's possibly worth noting that TypeScript was being used by development teams inside Microsoft before Dart was announced. There are some similarities in the problems these two technologies solve, but significant differences in the approach.Anonymous
February 27, 2014
TFS: don't care, happy with SVN at work, github at home. Typescript: don't care, JS is fine. The rest, meh.Anonymous
February 27, 2014
Great stuff guys. Thanks! Can't wait to give it a try.Anonymous
February 27, 2014
Is Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 CTP2 go-live? Thanks!Anonymous
February 27, 2014
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February 28, 2014
SCSS having built-in support is sweet. It's the one thing I use regularly that requires an extension, it'll be nice to have it work on everyone's machine without the "oh and go in the gallery and install this" reminder.Anonymous
February 28, 2014
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February 28, 2014
@JD - The RC releases are go-live, but the CTP releases are not. See support.microsoft.com/.../2927432 for details.Anonymous
February 28, 2014
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February 28, 2014
No updates for C++, not even bug fixes on earlier CTP?Anonymous
February 28, 2014
@Devil's Advocate - See my previous reply. @Lalit - There are a couple of updates for C++ and many bug fixes - see details in the release notes: support.microsoft.com/.../2927432Anonymous
March 01, 2014
Interesting to hear so many internal MS products adopting Typescript. Why no mention of Office365 or OWA??Anonymous
March 01, 2014
Will the offline documentation finally be fixed? And missing topics (Windows Desktop) restored?Anonymous
March 03, 2014
@Azarien: All the English-language offline books are live and available to customers. International versions are forthcoming.Anonymous
March 03, 2014
A shame there are so many trolls. Typescript is a wonderful example of Microsoft getting it right - a tool that fits perfectly in a niche not otherwise addressed: static typing and modularity, as a seamless addition to the world's most widely-used dynamic language. And it happens to be the best, most expressive/flexible type system in any mainstream language (yep, better than C#), due to its structural nature. And it's open source! You can install it on any platform with npm! I'm no cheerleader for MS usually but they deserve massive credit for this approach. It's "embrace and extend" done right. (Okay, now everyone can go back to complaining about the tragic lack of investment in proprietary, closed-source MS technologies that only run on Windows desktops.)Anonymous
March 05, 2014
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March 05, 2014
@rakker91 - 1 There is definitely something that seems wrong. As with any custom network configuration the best way to get get help is to open a ticket with MS support and they can help you troubleshoot and see if it is indeed a bug in the latest release of our client. Please open a support ticket against Visual Studio so we can get to the bottom of it. Our apologies for the inconvenience this is causing your team.Anonymous
March 11, 2014
The PDB file locking issue is not listed as an Update 2 bug fix (Connect said it should be fixed in 2). If it's not, I'm not sure of what I can do re: development, as VS is borderline unusable when I have to restart the IDE every time I make a change to my service project (upwards of 20 times per day!)Anonymous
March 11, 2014
@ Keith Patrick _b We believe we have fixed this for Update 2 CTP 2. Since it is difficult to reproduce, we cannot be 100% sure we have fixed your particular case. Once you have applied the update, please notice if you continue to see the behavior. If you do continue to see the behavior, try the following: press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12 four times in a row, and see if the PDB is still in use. If that doesn't work, please email us as vsdbgfb at microsoft dot com Thanks! Maria Visual Studio Debugger TeamAnonymous
March 11, 2014
@Maria - Are the people writing the release notes aware of the fix? I'm looking at the Fixed Issues section of KB2927432, and there's a total of 10 items, none of which mention file locking.Anonymous
March 13, 2014
Hi, I'm getting 'Unable to locate package source' errors whenever I try to run the web installer. Been trying for hours to get this working. There are too many environmental factors to take into account when getting web installers like this working. Please could you provide ISOs of future VS CTPs? Cheers, LukeAnonymous
March 16, 2014
@LM - We did start providing ISOs along with our final releases recently, but we have seen these account for a very small percent of the total downloads and have seen generally higher failure rates with these downloads due to the size. So we haven't provided ISOs for the preview releases like this one. We do plan to make an ISO of the final Update 2 release available though.Anonymous
March 16, 2014
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April 02, 2014
We need Git rebase! Without it, git tools are almost useless for teams that use rebase based workflows.Anonymous
April 03, 2014
You're right; we do need rebase support - or at least a reasonable subset of it like pull --rebase and squashing merges. We're working on it now.Anonymous
April 07, 2014
Are there any plans to have the LightSwitch HTML Client produce TypeScript (which of course then produces the actual JavaScript code) as a first-class language, instead of just JavaScript? I love LightSwitch, but I hate JavaScript. I went from a long career in VBA/VB.NET to C#, only then to be saddled with JS If LightSwitch produced TypeScript natively it would be a huge productivity enhancement for LightSwitch developers (like me).Anonymous
April 08, 2014
Hi. How can I enable the "Create Remote Resources" (Windows Azure) Checkbox in the File>New Project>Windows Azure Mobile Service Dialog? I already have installed the Azure SDK for .NET (2.3) and the Azure Powershell; I'm also already signed in with my azure account (Tools>Connect to Azure) but the Checkbox is still disabled. Any ideas?Anonymous
April 09, 2014
@hobe In the current release, you can't create a Mobile Service from the File > New Project experience. This is a known gap that we will be addressing in a future release. You can create a Mobile Service either through the Server Explorer or through the Publish wizard (select your project, right click and choose Publish).Anonymous
April 11, 2014
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April 15, 2014
great thanks how we can download visual studio 2013 update 2 for offline installer I have a slow net speed but there isn't and offline installer setup in the visualstudio.con/download please help where can I find offline installer for vs 2013 update 2 great thanks regards RahaAnonymous
April 15, 2014
@raha - this is addressed in the earlier comment from March 16th.