Fulfilling its “open by design” approach to helping developers, Microsoft today announced extensions to the Visual Studio platform that will reach developers regardless of the platform they’re working on.
Among the announcements at this morning’s Connect event in New York City was Visual Studio Dev Essentials, a free program that includes “everything a developer needs to create apps for any device or operating system,” Julia Liuson, corporate vice president for Visual Studio in Microsoft’s Developer Division, told the audience.
Included in that package are access to Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Code and new Visual Studio Team Services, formerly known as Visual Studio Online, the cloud-based version of its Team Foundation Server application life-cycle-management suite. There is also Parallels Desktop for Mac and training from Xamarin and PluralSight, according to the company’s announcement. It also will offer free Azure credits in early 2016 to enable developers to try out their applications in the cloud prior to live deployment, Liuson said.
(Related: COBOL lands on Visual Studio 2015)
The company’s free cross-platform IDE, Visual Studio Code, has been released to beta and is hosted on GitHub. It runs on Linux, OS X and Windows, and this new version has extensions for features, themes and language support, the company announced. Also today, Microsoft added support for Go as a language in Visual Studio Code, so, for example, developers could debug Java applications for Android using Visual Studio, or debug C++ applications on Linux, Liuson said.
Microsoft has also added a new way for developers to use Visual Studio. Today, the company announced cloud subscriptions that include Visual Studio Professional and Enterprise editions (available on a monthly basis) and a marketplace for services that will “enrich overall the developer experiences,” Liuson said. “It’s not picky about the kind of code you’re writing.”
A Nov. 30 update to Team Foundation Server will include a plug-in for the JetBrains Java language IDE IntelliJ, which will enable Java developers to stay in their IDE but access work items and source-control capabilities in TFS, Liuson explained.
TFS, as well as Visual Studio Team Services, she said, will deliver capabilities for hosting cloud builds, and a new analytics app called HockeyApp, acquired along with the company of the same name, will enable beta testing, user feedback collection and crash analytics. The offering enriches DevOps integration with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, she said. A public preview of Azure Service Fabric, a platform for developing microservices-based applications that integrate with Azure and Visual Studio, was also made available today.
Microsoft Graph was made generally available today, giving developers access to data, BI tools and APIs via single authorization into Microsoft’s cloud. Graph is designed to populate the most relevant work items, communications and feeds to a user’s desktop.
Lastly, release candidates of .NET Core 5 and ASP.NET 5 for Linux, OS X and Windows were delivered today. This enables developers to use them in production environments for any operating system, the company said.
“In today’s new world, technology capabilities equal business capabilities,” Liuson said of Microsoft’s push to help developers create applications in any language, for any platform. “There are enormous technology challenges to deliver against new business scenarios.”
