Somasegar's blog

TypeScript 0.9 Preview Release

S.Somasegar — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:54:00 GMT

Over the past few years, we’ve seen JavaScript applications for the web, on the server, and on Windows become much more substantial in size. To address this trend, last October we released the initial version of TypeScript, which enables application-scale JavaScript, providing high-fidelity interaction with existing JavaScript libraries, and giving developers the direct power and flexibility of JavaScript from a language that supports advanced tooling and error detection.

Today, I am happy to announce a major milestone in the evolution of TypeScript, with the 0.9 release. Along with important new language features and improved tooling capabilities in Visual Studio, we’ve done considerable work to scale the TypeScript language service for large application development, giving developers a smooth, interactive experience regardless of project size.

TypeScript has already been positively impacting web development, even as an early technical preview. Inside Microsoft, teams in Bing, Team Foundation Server, So.cl, CodePlex, and elsewhere are using TypeScript in production applications, some in excess of 200k lines, leveraging TypeScript’s ability to scale quickly with the assurances provided by a type system and rich IDE support. In the broader JavaScript community, projects like Turbulenz and Starling.js have leveraged TypeScript as part of new development libraries and kits. We’re also seeing teams building enterprise and consumer applications for the web, Windows Store, and server -- all with TypeScript.

A key piece of this growing TypeScript ecosystem is its development as an open source project on CodePlex. Hundreds of developers are engaging with the project across the forums, issue tracker, and source code forks. As a result of its openness, more than a dozen editors now support TypeScript, enabling development with TypeScript in a variety of popular tools, and across multiple major platforms. Additionally, integration with popular build systems, a diverse collection of library typings at DefinitelyTyped, test tools, and application models are available thanks to the TypeScript developer ecosystem. Largely in part of the efforts of the community, we’re honored to have been recognized as a 2012 Open Source Rookie of the Year for the TypeScript project.

These community efforts have been instrumental to guiding the 0.9 release. Notably with 0.9, we introduce generics, the most publically-requested feature. Generics take advantage of the strong type inference that TypeScript already provides, allowing users to have better static error reporting and richer tooling, in many cases without any additional type annotations.

Imprecise typing of the 0.8 release:

Improved, precise typing of the new 0.9 release:

In the above example, we can see the contrast between what was possible with the 0.8 and the new 0.9 languages. Prior to this release, the lengthOfSecond variable would have the type ‘any’ because the language could not precisely describe how the map method passed type information from the array to its output. Now, with generics, the 0.9 compiler can correctly traffic this type information to the output, giving lengthOfSecond the correct type of ‘number’. We’ve incorporated this improved type information in the typing of the JavaScript API, the HTML DOM, and code samples so that developers can begin leveraging these improvements immediately after upgrading.

In addition to generics, the language service has been completely rewritten for much-improved interactive performance. Building web and Windows Store applications should now feel more responsive for IntelliSense, code navigation, and refactoring, especially as projects grow in size.

As we drive towards TypeScript 1.0, we’re focused on making it a flexible, fast, and powerful tool shaped by community feedback on real-world problems, and we’re excited to continue working with the community that grows around it.

For more information on the TypeScript 0.9 release, see the TypeScript team blog. You can download the release now from http://www.typescriptlang.org/#Download.

Namaste!

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ssomasegar.

Visual Studio 2013, ALM, and DevOps

S.Somasegar — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 13:20:00 GMT

Since launching Visual Studio 2012, we’ve been thrilled with the customer adoption and partner momentum we’ve seen. Visual Studio 2012 has been downloaded more than 4 million times, the fastest adoption of any Visual Studio release in the past. We’ve also delivered new value into Visual Studio 2012 through two VS Updates, VS2012.1 and VS2012.2, updates which are now being used on more than 60% of Visual Studio 2012 deployments. The functionality available in Visual Studio is further augmented by a robust ecosystem of extensions and integrated solutions, including almost 500 VSIP products in market, and more than 3900 products and extensions for Visual Studio in the Visual Studio Gallery.

Not only have we seen great adoption on the client, in the cloud we’ve continued to see terrific uptake of Team Foundation Service, which we released for general availability at Build 2012 and which we’ve been updating approximately every three weeks with new capabilities, including with Git support as announced in January at the ALM Summit.

Even with this progress, there are many great opportunities to advance the state of the art for developers and development teams building modern apps and managing the modern app lifecycle. With multi-year release cycles vanishing and being replaced by shorter build/measure/learn cycles, development teams are more earnestly incorporating operations and other stakeholders into the development process. Modern application lifecycle management practices enable teams to support a continuous delivery cadence that balances agility and quality, while removing the traditional silos separating developers from operations and business stakeholders, improving communication and collaboration within development teams, and driving connections between applications and business outcomes. Microsoft is extending the ALM capabilities we’ve built into Visual Studio 2012 and its updates by further enabling such “DevOps” scenarios with our tools and services, yielding a more friction-free and higher quality path to production.

In this vein, today marks the start of TechEd North America 2013, and with it I’m excited to announce several key advances related to the modern application lifecycle.

Visual Studio 2013

I’m thrilled to share that our next major release, Visual Studio 2013, will be available later this year, with a preview build publicly available at Build 2013 in San Francisco at the end of the month. In his keynote demo and follow-on foundational session today at TechEd, Brian Harry highlighted some of the new ALM capabilities coming in this release and in the cloud, including new features focused on business agility, quality enablement, and DevOps. Here are a few of my favorites:

Agile portfolio management, which enables you to plan your agile projects “at scale” by showing the hierarchical relationship between work being done in multiple teams across your organization.
Cloud-based load testing, a new capability of Team Foundation Service that takes advantage of the elastic scalability of Windows Azure to generate traffic, simulating thousands of simultaneous virtual users so as to help you understand how your web applications and services operate under load.
Code information indicators that provide information about unit tests, work items, code references, and more, all directly within the code editor in Visual Studio, increasing developer productivity by enabling project-related contextual information to be viewed and consumed without leaving the editor.
A team room integrated into TFS, improving the collaboration amongst team members via a real-time and persistent chat room that integrates with data and interactions elsewhere in TFS.
Identity integrated into Visual Studio, such that the IDE is connected to backend services that support, for example, roaming the developer’s settings as the developer moves from installation to installation.
Support in TFS for integrated code comments that facilitate code reviews with increased transparency and traceability.
A .NET memory dump analyzer, which enables developers to easily explore .NET objects in a memory dump and to compare two memory dumps in pursuit of finding and fixing memory leaks.
Git support built into Visual Studio 2013, both on the client and on the server, including in the on-premises Team Foundation Server 2013.

These are just a few of the new capabilities available with this release, which we’ll be talking much more about in the coming weeks and at Build. Many of these features are available starting today on Team Foundation Service.

InRelease

DevOps is an increasingly important part of application lifecycle management and is a growing area of interest as businesses need to develop and deploy quality applications at a faster pace. We continue to invest in improving the modern application lifecycle, with a particular focus on DevOps.

As part of this increased focus, today I’m excited to announce Microsoft’s agreement to acquire InCycle’s InRelease Business Unit, a leading release management solution for .NET and Windows Server applications. InCycle’s InRelease product is a continuous delivery solution that automates the release process through all of your environments from TFS through to production, all in one solution, and all integrated with TFS.

This acquisition will extend Microsoft’s offerings in the ALM and DevOps space. We look forward to continuing to offer customers new tools and capabilities to help them develop and operate the high quality applications and services they need to run their businesses with increasing agility.

MSDN and Dev/Test on Windows Azure

The technical improvements we’re making to Visual Studio represent just one facet of the work we’re doing to improve the productivity and success of teams using Microsoft platforms.

For example, we’ve improved the Windows Azure benefit available as part of eligible MSDN subscriptions; you now have a choice as to how you use your Windows Azure credits for development and test, whether you apply them for Virtual Machines, Web Sites, Cloud Services, Mobile Services, Media Services, HDInsight, or beyond. The Windows Azure MSDN benefit includes access to virtual machine images preconfigured with MSDN subscription software, such as SQL Server and BizTalk Server, and alternatively supports uploading your own virtual machine with your MSDN software.

Further, one of our goals is to make it easy for every member of a development team, whether dev or test, to be empowered to provision without friction the environments they need when they need them. With the new Windows Azure MSDN benefit for dev and test, we are taking an important step towards realizing that goal. As of June 1st, MSDN subscribers now have use rights to run in Windows Azure VMs selected software they get through MSDN (see the Visual Studio and MSDN licensing white paper for more details).

These improvements help to make development teams more agile by providing them with simple and scalable access to development and test cloud-based resources.

Namaste!

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ssomasegar.

Enterprise Library 6.0

S.Somasegar — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:56:00 GMT

I’ve written on my blog before about the Microsoft Enterprise Library. Enterprise Library has a long and accomplished history of providing architectural guidance, recommended practices, and reusable components to help developers, architects, and IT professionals efficiently build line-of-business (LOB) systems. Over the years, it's achieved a significant reach, seeing over 4 million downloads and powering many industrial systems.

I’m excited to share that the patterns & practices team has just released Enterprise Library 6.0. This new version not only includes new reusable components (called “application blocks”), but also extends the library’s integration with other technologies (such as with ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API) and simplifies its learning and usage.

While this 6.0 release is filled with great things to talk about, I want to highlight three in particular:

.NET 4.5 saw the introduction of the EventSource class, which dramatically simplifies the task of doing ETW tracing in managed applications (ETW, or Event Tracing for Windows, is a fast and scalable logging mechanism built into the Windows operating system). Enterprise Library 6.0 includes the new Semantic Logging Application Block, which enables you to have the simplicity and power of EventSource while still utilizing log formats and storage facilities you’re familiar with. With this block, you can easily direct your log messages to a variety of destinations, such as rolling flat files, SQL Server databases, or Windows Azure table storage, while still maintaining the structured nature that ETW and EventSource provide. This structure makes it much easier to later aggregate, query, and process the information you've captured.
LOB apps are more and more likely to be running in distributed environments, where intermittent error conditions are not uncommon. The updated Transient Fault Handling Application Block, which helps to provide resilience against such conditions, has been updated with new detection strategies and with support for the new asynchronous programming features of C# 5 and Visual Basic 11, enabling increased scalability. It’s also now available as a portable library for use with .NET 4.5, Windows Store apps, and Windows Phone apps.
Previous releases of Enterprise Library have included Unity, a lightweight and extensible dependency injection container that facilitates building loosely coupled applications. With this release, it’s seen several important enhancements, including support for Windows Store apps.

As has been the case with Enterprise Library in the past, you can easily add to your projects just the blocks you need by using the NuGet package manager in Visual Studio:

You can check out the Enterprise Library at http://entlib.codeplex.com.

Namaste!

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ssomasegar.

Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Now Available

S.Somasegar — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:52:00 GMT

We finished the RTM release of Visual Studio 2012 in August 2012 and launched it in September. At that time, we committed to releasing new value into Visual Studio via a regular cadence of Visual Studio Updates, and in November 2012 we released our first, Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (VS2012.1), which contained not only bug fixes and performance improvements, but also new functionality spanning four primary areas of investment: Windows development, SharePoint development, agile teams, and continuous quality.

I’m excited to announce that today we’ve shipped Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2) and that it’s now available for download. Just as with VS2012.1 (which is installed as part of VS2012.2 for those of you who don’t already have VS2012.1 installed), this release contains important fixes as well as a wealth of new functionality, addressing feedback we’ve received from the community and aligning with key software development trends in the market. The new functionality primarily spans (though is not limited to) five areas of investment: agile planning, quality enablement, Windows Store development, line-of-business development, and the general developer experience.

Agile planning. Visual Studio 2012 introduced a wide range of capabilities focused on enabling agile teams, not only for development but also for planning. With VS2012.2, Team Foundation Server (TFS) has been augmented with an additional variety of features to help make it even easier for agile teams to do their planning, in particular around adapting to a team’s preferences and work styles. For example, VS2012.1 introduced new project tracking options, including a Kanban board and a cumulative flow diagram; VS2012.2 augments those experiences with the ability to customize the Kanban board to adapt it for an organization’s needs. Other features include work item tagging that provides a simple and flexible way to add metadata to work items in support of better organization and reporting, support for emailing work items via the TFS Web Access portal, and more.

Quality Enablement. A key focus area for Visual Studio 2012 is in enabling quality to be maintained and improved throughout development cycles. This focus can be seen not only in the RTM release, but also in VS2012.1, with the added support for code coverage with manual ASP.NET testing, with support in Test Explorer for custom “traits”, with support for cross-browser testing, and with improvements to Microsoft Test Manager. Now with VS2012.2, support for quality enablement is taken even further. This update introduces web-based access to the Test Case Management tools in TFS such that users can now author, edit, and execute test cases through the web portal. It also includes the ability to profile unit tests (with results across both the unit tests and the code under test surfaced through a single report), improved unit testing support for both asynchronous code and for interactions with the UI, unit testing support for Windows Phone 8 apps, unit test playlists that enable a subset of tests to be managed together, significant improvements around testing for SharePoint 2013 (web and load testing, unit testing with emulators, coded UI support, and IntelliTrace support), and more.

Windows Store development. VS2012.2 includes additional new features for Windows Store development, beyond the quality enablement capabilities already mentioned. For example, VS2012.1 included a new memory profiling tool for apps implemented with JavaScript, enabling developers to better understand the memory usage of their apps, to find and fix leaks, and so forth; for VS2012.2, we continued to invest in improved diagnostics for JavaScript apps with a new profiling tool that helps diagnose UI responsiveness issues and latency in visual updates. This release also incorporates the latest version of the Windows App Certification Kit.

Line-of-business development. Beyond improved support for building Windows Store apps, VS2012.2 also brings with it a wealth of new and improved capabilities for developing and modernizing line-of-business (LOB) apps. This includes the ability to use LightSwitch to easily build cross-browser and mobile web clients with HTML and JavaScript, with support to target SharePoint 2013 and Office 365. It includes support in Blend for SketchFlow, WPF 4.5, and Silverlight 5. And more.

Development experience. As developers spend so much of their time using the IDE, it’s important that Visual Studio provide as streamlined an experience as possible. Towards that end, we continually invest in new features and productivity enhancements to make the IDE the best and most productive environment possible, a trend we continue with VS2012.2. Code map has been updated with improved responsiveness as well as with debugger integration, providing a visual perspective on the relationships and dependencies in code being debugged. Symbol loading has been improved across both the profiling and IntelliTrace experiences. The Workflow designer now has an improved debugging experience. The XAML design surface in both Blend and the Visual Studio editor includes multiple performance and reliability improvements, in particular when loading large projects and when using third-party controls. The IDE’s light and dark themes are now joined by a third, blue theme. And more, such as including all of the improvements made available through ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2.

Install Update 2 today to get the latest support Visual Studio has to offer. A more expansive list of what’s new in VS2012.2, including new features and bug fixes, is also available.

Namaste!

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ssomasegar.

Now Available: Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012

S.Somasegar — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:03:00 GMT

As I’ve written about previously, we’ve been developing tools for building the next-generation of apps for Office and SharePoint. These tools manifest both as an online experience known as “Napa”, which we’ve been updating on a weekly basis, as well as a complete set of extensions to the rich Visual Studio client, extensions we’ve shared several times in preview form. Hot on the heels of last week’s announcement of commercial availability of the new Microsoft Office 365, I’m excited to announce that today we’re releasing those rich client tools, the Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012. You can download them now from http://aka.ms/OfficeDevToolsForVS2012.

The Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 provide broad and deep support, ranging from new templates to new designers to a whole host of integrated lifecycle tools. They enable developers to create, edit, test, debug, package, and deploy apps for Office and SharePoint, across all current Office and SharePoint hosting models and app types. In addition, beyond supporting a new application model based on web technologies, these tools also provide full support both for VSTO Add-ins and SharePoint Solutions.

For those of you who have downloaded our preview builds of these tools, you’ll find some very welcome enhancements in this release. For example, the tools now include a validation experience that helps you to find and fix common errors prior to submitting your apps to the Office Store. They enable a continuous integration workflow, with both the on-premises Team Foundation Server and the cloud-hosted Team Foundation Service supporting build workflows for apps for Office and SharePoint. Windows Azure cloud service projects can be used to easily create provider-hosted apps for SharePoint. The workflow designers have been dramatically improved, with a lot of fit-and-finish applied since the last preview. Remote debugging is now much more applicable and powerful, thanks to Service Bus. And a whole lot more.

As an avid user of both Office and SharePoint, I’m frequently on the lookout for the next great app to make me and my team more productive. To share your apps in the Office Store so that users like me can find them, you’ll need an Office 365 Developer Subscription, which includes a SharePoint Online Developer Site customized for creating and testing apps, and a Microsoft Seller Dashboard account to make your apps available to the hundreds of millions of Office and SharePoint users worldwide. To assist you with this, we’ve added a new MSDN benefit for subscribers of Visual Studio Premium and Ultimate with MSDN: a one-time 12-month Office 365 Developer Subscription. Eligible MSDN subscribers can activate this benefit today from their My Account page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/ (the benefit excludes MPN, DreamSpark, BizSpark, and WebsiteSpark subscriptions).

Download the tools, and get started building your app today. For more information on building apps for Office and Sharepoint, see the Apps for Office and SharePoint blog.

Namaste!

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ssomasegar.

The Evolution of DevLabs

S.Somasegar — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:20:00 GMT

A little over four years ago, we created the DevLabs portal on MSDN. The idea behind this site was to provide a hub for Microsoft teams to publicly share prototypes of innovative tools for developers, showcasing and gathering feedback on technologies that were in their early stages.

In the time since, we’ve seen a wealth of exciting projects come and go, many eventually moving in one way, shape, or form into Microsoft products. For example, DevLabs was the initial home for Code Contracts, a general design-by-contract mechanism from Microsoft Research for .NET programmers. The library support for Code Contracts then shipped in the .NET Framework 4, and the Microsoft Research (MSR) team behind it has been actively researching and investing in the associated testing, verification, and documentation tools. As another example, DevLabs was the home for Axum, a .NET language for building parallel applications. Axum itself was later retired from DevLabs, but not before some of its core concepts were adopted by mainstream development technologies; for example, the asynchronous programming support in C# and Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2012 was initially prototyped in Axum. From CHESS to PEX to Reactive Extensions to "Casablanca" and beyond, some very useful technologies have gotten their start on DevLabs over the last few years.

At the same time, the development landscape has been evolving. It’s become increasingly simple for anyone to codify their ideas and quickly deploy solutions in order to share concepts and learn from experiments. In conjunction, multiple sites have sprung up to facilitate this, whether for sharing source code, such as with CodePlex, or for sharing tools and extensions, such as with the Visual Studio Gallery. These sites are often integrated with the developer’s environment, such as with Visual Studio Gallery integration into Visual Studio through the Extensions and Updates dialog, providing easy self-service support for a developer to push an update out to millions of consumers of their work.

With these advances, it’s time to evolve the DevLabs experience. Starting today, we’re redirecting the existing DevLabs portal to a new DevLabs collection in the Visual Studio Gallery. When you browse the gallery, you’ll find a Microsoft collection that includes official releases from Microsoft (such as the NuGet Package Manager, the Productivity Power Tools, or the Team Foundation Server Power Tools), but you’ll also find a new Microsoft DevLabs collection. As was the case with the previous DevLabs portal, this is an outlet for experiments from Microsoft, experiments that represent some of the latest ideas around developer tools. This new site will enable more teams from Microsoft to more quickly share their latest thinking, and to do so in a manner that works seamlessly with developers’ day-to-day workflows.

As an example, a tool available in the Microsoft DevLabs category today is the “Inline Navigate To” extension. With Visual Studio 2012, developers can use the Navigate To dialog to navigate to a file or symbol, and this new extension aims to improve on that experience, with better performance, better results relevance, improved filtering capabilities, and improved UI aesthetics, including a modeless UI. Give it a test drive today and provide feedback to the team on whether and how you’d like to see such improvements included in a future Visual Studio release.

We look forward to evolving this Microsoft DevLabs collection with new ideas and solutions as we have them available.

Namaste!

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ssomasegar.

Improving the Modern Application Lifecycle

S.Somasegar — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:19:00 GMT

This week in Redmond, Microsoft is hosting the 3rd annual ALM Summit, a gathering of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) practitioners interested in learning more about the craft and sharing their own experiences with others. Over the course of three packed days and across four tracks of discussions focused on DevOps, testing, agile development, and ALM leadership, attendees are discussing and collaborating with others in the field, all with the goal of improving how our industry delivers software and services.

A key set of themes during this summit focuses on real change happening in the industry. In a world of devices and services, we’re seeing that feedback and iteration are the name of the game, with multi-year release trains replaced by faster and thoughtful build/measure/learn cycles, with a need for friction-free paths to production yielding advances in quality enablement and continuous deployment, with the blurring of development team roles, and with teams becoming more and more distributed.

All of this has led us to shift our approach in how we improve and release Visual Studio, while at the same time ensuring that new value includes capabilities to propel this “new normal.” In November, we shipped Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (VS2012.1), an update to Visual Studio 2012 that provided not only fixes for bugs in the RTM release of Visual Studio 2012, but also a wealth of new features, spanning improved support for agile teams and continuous quality in addition to improved support for Windows and SharePoint development. Today, I’m happy to share that we’ve released our first preview of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2). This preview includes all of the improvements from VS2012.1 while also introducing web-based support for Test Case Management (TCM), improved support for work item tagging, unit testing features for Windows Phone 8, and more. You can now download this preview, and you can expect subsequent previews and the eventual release of VS2012.2 to contain many more exciting capabilities.

However, while I’m excited by this VS2012.2 preview release, I’m even more excited by another of today’s announcements. As Brian Harry just announced in his keynote this morning at the ALM Summit, we’ve added Git source code management to Team Foundation Service, with Git repositories hosted in Team Foundation Service available today for use seamlessly from any Git tool on any operating system. Developers can now benefit from Microsoft’s fully-integrated ALM suite, while at the same time having a choice of using Git or TFVC (Team Foundation Version Control) for their source control repositories. We’ll continue to invest in both Git and TFVC (Team Foundation Version Control) throughout future releases, as we see both centralized version control and distributed version control systems as being optimized for different types of projects and development workflows.

As part of this effort, today we’re also releasing a preview of an extension for VS2012.2 that enables connecting Visual Studio to Git repositories hosted in any Git host, including Team Foundation Service, CodePlex, GitHub, and any number of other 3rd-party services. To create this extension, we utilized the open source library libgit2, and in the process, several of our full-time engineers worked as committers to the libgit2 project. These capabilities will be built into a future release of Visual Studio, enabling it to serve as an incredibly robust Git client, one that provides seamless integration with the rest of the simplicity and power provided by Visual Studio. For more detail on these announcements, see Brian Harry’s blog.

Namaste!

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ssomasegar.

Visual Studio and Internationalization

S.Somasegar — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:31:00 GMT

Our developer customer base for Visual Studio is truly global. A significant portion of the Visual Studio user base is international, and as a result, we spend a lot of time and energy making sure that Visual Studio yields a great experience, regardless of locale, and we continually strive to improve that experience.

One recent manifestation of this was in how we handled language releases for Visual Studio 2012. In previous versions of Visual Studio, we would first ship the English version, and weeks later we would subsequently ship versions of Visual Studio localized into multiple languages. For Visual Studio 2012, we changed our internal processes so that when we shipped, we shipped all of our 10 languages simultaneously: English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. All 10 languages are available from the Visual Studio download site.

This commitment continued with the recently released Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (Visual Studio 2012.1) for which we also simultaneously released all 10 languages.

Beyond these 10 languages, however, Visual Studio can also be extended via additional “community” language packs. Throughout the Visual Studio 2012 product cycle, we maintained close partnerships with prestigious universities and with Microsoft Valued Professionals (MVPs) from around the world, with the goal of supporting additional languages in Visual Studio 2012. The resulting community language packs, available for Czech, Polish, Turkish, and Brazilian Portuguese, provide a localized experience for the majority of the Visual Studio user interface, with hundreds of thousands of localized words. These community language packs are available for download for Visual Studio Professional, Premium, and Ultimate, as well as for multiple Express versions.

Of course, the need for localized content extends well beyond the Visual Studio user interface. One of the largest sources of such content is the Visual Studio documentation on MSDN, available in all 14 previously mentioned languages. This translated content comes from a variety of sources, including Visual Studio team members, machine translation, and the community. You, too, can contribute, using the MSDN Translation Wiki, which enables you to suggest improved translations and be recognized for your contributions via the MSDN and TechNet recognition system. For more info, see the Developer Content Localization Team’s blog.

Moving forward, we strive to improve further upon the global experience we provide with Visual Studio, and we look forward to any and all assistance you provide in that endeavor.

Namaste!

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ssomasegar.

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 Now Available!

S.Somasegar — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 20:15:00 GMT

“Firsts” excite me. This excitement isn’t about competition with others, but rather about competition with ourselves and our past, about constantly working to better what we do and how we do it, and about the value we provide to developers and teams who use our tools. At our Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 launch event in September, I talked about our strong commitment to continuous value delivery and our new approach for providing updates to Visual Studio on a regular cadence of shorter intervals:

I’m excited to announce that the first such update, Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (Visual Studio 2012.1), is now available. You can install it today from the download page (see "Visual Studio 2012 Update 1" under the "Additional software" section).

With this and future updates, we’re striving to ensure that developers and development teams always have the best solution for building modern applications and for managing the modern application lifecycle. This approach to delivering updates, integrated directly into the IDE, should make it much easier for developers to keep the Visual Studio client up-to-date.

Importantly, this isn’t just about bug fixes, though it contains quite a few of those to measurably address issues reported through Connect, UserVoice, and Windows Error Reporting. This update also delivers a wealth of new functionality into Visual Studio 2012. The new functionality in Update 1 primarily spans four areas of investment: Windows development, SharePoint development, agile teams, and continuous quality.

Windows Development. A big focus area for us when designing Visual Studio 2012 was in enabling developers to build stellar apps for Windows, and that trend continues with Update 1, with which we’ve improved Windows development in a variety of areas. Back in June, we announced we would enable C++ applications to target Windows XP from Visual Studio 2012, and that support is now available as part of Update 1. For Windows Store applications for Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 includes support for both mixed-mode managed/native debugging and for native ARM dump debugging. Update 1 also includes improved diagnostics and testing support for Windows Store apps, such as with a JavaScript memory analysis tool, support for data-driven unit tests, and C++ unit testing enhancements. Additionally, for developers building apps for Windows Phone 8, we’ve enabled code analysis to help improve the quality of their phone apps.

SharePoint Development. Beyond the core platform support for SharePoint development available via “Napa” and the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio, with Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 we’ve invested in building out significant new application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities for SharePoint applications. This work is primarily centered around multiple forms of testing: from load testing that enables the stressing of SharePoint applications with simulated load and network conditions; to performance testing that enables recording and running performance suites against SharePoint solutions; to unit testing that enables coded UI tests for simulating user interaction and that enables using the Microsoft Fakes Framework for stubbing out SharePoint dependencies in unit tests. Update 1 also updates IntelliTrace to capture SharePoint logging information, in order to provide a rich analysis experience for SharePoint applications.

Agile Teams. With Visual Studio 2012, we introduced a wealth of features to support agile teams, from stakeholders to developers to testers to project managers, and Update 1 further builds upon this focus. The update includes many usability improvements to enable user productivity while managing projects in the web-based interface for Team Foundation Server, such as with new ways to navigate around the UI, more cases where dragging and dropping is relevant, and a much improved source viewing and diffing experience. Update 1 also includes Kanban support: in addition to the existing Scrum and task board support, the Kanban support offers a new range of project tracking options, including a Kanban board and a cumulative flow diagram. In fact, Update 1 includes for Team Foundation Server most of the improvements made to Team Foundation Service in recent months. Visual Studio now also includes a new visualization feature, Code Map, which enables developers to dynamically build views of relevant areas of a code base in order to understand and navigate its relationships quickly.

Continuous Quality. Last but not least, enabling continuous quality is a key focus area for Update 1, beyond the Windows and SharePoint testing features already mentioned. This spans testing at all levels, from the management of tests to their execution. For example, code coverage is now supported for manual testing of ASP.NET applications, enabling testers to analyze which areas of a code base are used during manual testing (similar to the support already enabled for automated tests). Cross-browser testing is now supported, with the ability to record tests on Internet Explorer and later replay them with most modern browsers. Test Explorer in Visual Studio has been augmented to enable custom “traits”; these traits are specified in the tests, allowing developers to specify how tests should be grouped and run. Microsoft Test Manager has also been enhanced in several customer-requested areas, such as with support for pausing/resuming of manual test sessions and automatically creating an image log of all actions performed during an exploratory testing session.

Install Update 1 today to upgrade Visual Studio 2012 to the latest available bits. We plan to release these Visual Studio Updates regular cadence, so stay tuned for more to come.

Finally, though unrelated to Update 1, if you’re looking for even more functionality in Visual Studio 2012, consider installing the recently released and free Productivity Power Tools add-in from the Visual Studio Gallery. Created by individuals on the Visual Studio team, this is a pack of extensions focused on further streamlining the developer experience within Visual Studio 2012, with features like colorized parameter help, a custom document well, automatic brace completion, an enhanced scroll bar, and much more.

Namaste!

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Building Apps for Office and SharePoint

S.Somasegar — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 18:55:00 GMT

Several months ago, I shared the news of our new set of development tools for Office and SharePoint, including the in-browser “Napa” tools and the rich client Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012.

Today at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, we shared significant updates to these tools, with a range of improved support to make building new Office 2013, Office 365, SharePoint 2013, and SharePoint Online in Office 365 more flexible and productive.

Over the last few months we’ve been making continuous updates to “Napa”, a lightweight, in-browser companion to the full Visual Studio rich client. These updates have included support for publishing apps to SharePoint, for sharing a project with a friend or with the community, lots of editor improvements, and much more. As you don’t need to install anything onto your machine in order to build apps with “Napa”, it’s the fastest way to get started with Office and SharePoint development. You can do so today at http://dev.office.com.

Of course, as these projects grow, developers can smoothly transition their work with their projects in the browser to the rich client Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012. With support ranging from new designers to new templates, these tools enable developers to create, edit, build, debug, package, and deploy apps for Office and SharePoint, across all current Office and SharePoint hosting models and app types. Today, we’re releasing Preview 2 of this suite, which you can download and install into Visual Studio Professional 2012, Visual Studio Premium 2012, and Visual Studio Ultimate 2012.

Additionally, now included as part of the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 is the LightSwitch HTML Client for Visual Studio 2012 – Preview 2. With this release, LightSwitch enables developers to easily build touch-oriented business applications with HTML5 that run well across a breadth of devices. These apps can be standalone, but with this preview developers can now also quickly build and deploy data-driven apps for SharePoint using the new web standards-based apps model.

You can stay up-to-date on the latest in Office development from the team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps.

Namaste!

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