Microsoft today released update 2 to its Visual Studio development environment, with an enhanced Kanban board for agile project planning and added testing capabilities.
According to a blog post by S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, update 2 enables organizations to adapt the Kanban board to their preferences and organizational needs, with the ability to customize columns specific to their style.
To further enhance agile planning, update 2 includes a work-item tagging feature that lets users more easily apply metadata to the work items, and those work items can now be e-mailed to team members via the Team Foundation Service Web Access portal, Somasegar wrote.
Developers also will see an improve code map, featuring better responsiveness and integration with the debugger. This offers a visual representation of code relationships and interdependencies. The workflow designer also has a better debugging experience, Somasegar wrote.
Microsoft continued its push for quality enablement in this release with Web-based access to the test-case-management tools in Team Foundation Service. With this, developers and testers can create and execute test cases through the Web portal, Somasegar explained. Further, unit tests can be profiled. Support for unit-testing Windows Phone 8 applications and improved testing for SharePoint 2013 were also added to the update.
As for applications created for the Windows Store, the update offers enhanced diagnostics for JavaScript applications. Somasegar wrote that a new profiling tool helps diagnose UI responsiveness issues and latency in visual updates. The Windows App Certification Kit also is built into the release.
For Web-based business applications, new LightSwitch support enables Web clients to be built with HTML and JavaScript for cross-browser or mobile use, targeting Office 365 and SharePoint 2013.
