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Microsoft did an online virtual event called Connect(); on the first day, they made a number of announcements about changes and updates coming out of Microsoft including new product releases and a change to the Visual Studio Editions. The short list of big announcements is:
- .NET is going Open Source & Cross platform – They are working to make .NET open sourced.
- Visual Studio 2015 Preview released, which includes.NET 2015 Preview and ASP.NET 5 Preview
- Visual Studio for Android Preview for Visual Studio 2015 released
- Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 released to web
- Visual Studio Community 2013 released
- Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova CTP 3, for Visual Studio 2013 released
- Azure SDK 2.5 released to web
- Release Management as a Service Preview, in Visual Studio Online announced
- Application Insight Updates & CodeLens in Visual Studio Online announced
Today Microsoft will be announcing and presenting on a number of other areas including Azure, .NET 2015 and managed languages, ASP.NET 5.0, multi-device development, ALM, C++ 11/14,vand more.
.NET is Going Open Source
ASP.NET went open source and .NET is now going open source as well. The core .NET framework including things like CLR, Garbage Collection, and base classes are expected to go open source. This should be on GitHub at this point. There are some things that are not likely to go open source, but this is primarily because they are expected to be used system-wide and therefore changes to them could update (and mess up) other programs on a system.
Related to the open source nature, the .NET Core server run-time and framework for Linux and Mac will be opens source by Microsoft as part of the .NET Foundation.
While it is obvious that .NET is going to Linux and the MacOs, one of the interesting side comments made regarding open source was that there is a rumor that some people are looking into porting it to Raspberry Pi!
Difference from Visual Studio Editions to Community Edition
Microsoft also announced a new skew of Visual Studio, the Visual Studio Community Edition. This is a full featured edition that is available for free on the Visual Studio page. Like the existing full versions of Visual Studio, the Community edition will allow for add-ins and other customization features to work, thus giving users a complete environment to do development within. It was stated that the Community Edition provides one edition for Microsoft to maintain instead of several Express editions going forward.
Visual Studio 2015
As mentioned above, Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 2015 Preview were released. These are previews of what is coming. You can get these at http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/visual-studio-2015-downloads-vs. Note that these are previews, so there is no Go Live at this time.
This is just a few of the things that have been mentioned in the last 24 hours. There were lots of comments on WPF, Cordova, Xamarin, and so much more. Today there are expected to be a lot of additional great comments. Microsoft has been busy.
