Somasegar's blog

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!

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

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!

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

Team Foundation Service is Released

S.Somasegar — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Team Foundation Server is a mainstay of Microsoft’s collaboration platform for software development teams. It provides modern application lifecycle support for modern app development, including agile project planning and management tools, version control, build automation, and the continuous deployment automation needed to effectively and efficiently manage software development projects.

In addition to the value TFS provides to development teams targeting Windows, more and more we’re seeing it used in heterogeneous environments as well, whether developers are using Visual Studio or Eclipse or Xcode; whether developers are building apps with .NET or Java or C++ or JavaScript or any number of other languages; and whether developers are building apps for Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Azure, Android, iOS, MacOS, or Linux. We’re also seeing the cloud become a key enabler across the lifecycle of applications.

Last year at the Build conference, we announced Team Foundation Service, a version of Team Foundation Server hosted on Windows Azure, accessible from anywhere using existing and familiar tools, and welcoming all languages and platforms. Over the last year, we’ve run the service as a preview, and during this time we’ve continued to build out the breadth and depth of functionality included. Today, I’m very excited to share that Team Foundation Service is now released, out of preview and available for full production use. Check it out for yourself at https://tfs.visualstudio.com.

Team Foundation Service includes a free usage plan with a robust set of features that make it quick and easy for individuals and lean teams to get started with this application lifecycle management (ALM) platform, and without the need to stand up their own hardware, manage backups, or keep the server up-to-date. It welcomes developers targeting Microsoft platforms and other platforms, with support not only in Visual Studio, Excel, and Project, but also for developers on Mac OS, Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX through Team Explorer Everywhere and the Git-TF command-line tools. The free plan includes support for up to 5 users, an unlimited number of projects, version control, work item tracking, agile planning tools, feedback management, and build (the last of which is still in preview).

In addition, MSDN subscribers at the Visual Studio Test Pro with MSDN, Visual Studio Premium with MSDN, and Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN levels will have use of the service included as a subscription benefit. For the time being, anyone can sign up and use the service for free. We’ll be announcing more about paid plans and services in 2013.

With the many new computing platforms and development tools becoming available right now, it’s a great time to be a developer. You can sign up for your own Team Foundation Service account at https://tfs.visualstudio.com and see for yourself what a cloud-hosted, modern collaboration and ALM tool brings to your team. We’re currently adding new features and capabilities to the service every three weeks or so, putting us in a great position to react to your needs and make adjustments based on your feedback. Use it and let us know what you think.

Namaste!

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

Building Apps for Windows Phone 8

S.Somasegar — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 18:07:00 GMT

It’s a very exciting time for developers! Last week, we launched Windows 8 and Surface. On Monday, we launched Windows Phone 8 and introduced some awesome new smartphone devices. Today, we’re kicking off the Build conference, where we’ll join with thousands of developers in person, and with hundreds of thousands virtually, to explore the opportunities available with Microsoft platforms and tools. And now, in conjunction with yesterday’s Windows Phone 8 news and with our goal of having tools available on the same cadence as the platforms, I’m very excited to share that the Windows Phone SDK 8.0, including Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Phone, is now available for download.

With Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Windows Azure, developers using Visual Studio 2012 can build experiences that span the Windows ecosystem, from desktops to laptops to tablets to smartphones to the cloud. And with that in mind, today’s release of the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 enables some exciting new capabilities for developers, such as using C++ and DirectX to build stunning experiences, enabling in-app purchases to sell virtual and digital good within apps, helping developers to streamline their efforts with the advances we’ve made in Visual Studio 2012 and .NET, and more.

The Windows Phone SDK 8.0 works with the Visual Studio 2012 and enables you to get started today building great apps for both Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 7.x. It includes emulators for both environments, including the ability to validate for multiple chassis, and support for simulating various network conditions (e.g. ‘2G’, ‘3G’). It includes new templates for developing Windows Phone apps, such as for building apps with Direct3D, and it sports enhanced diagnostics for analyzing apps, such as power and network profiling and responsiveness monitoring. It enables building native apps as well as building managed apps that consume native libraries. It enables much easier portability between Windows 8 apps and Windows Phone 8 apps. It includes .NET portable library support, so you can write your libraries once and reuse them across all your apps. The list goes on.

As an avid user of Windows Phone, I’m looking forward to downloading and using the stellar apps you all create.

For a more in-depth tour through what’s new for developers in the Windows Phone SDK 8.0, see the Visual Studio team, .NET team, and Blend team blogs.

Namaste!

Follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/ssomasegar.