They dunked Visual Studio 2015 in a bucket of
awesome-sauce and pulled out Update 1! This article will help step you through the update as well as the other details we announced @ Connect().
What’s new for everybody but developers?
We might as well get this out of the way. It’s good to be
aware.
Consumer enhancements
Not every user of Windows is a developer in this
bring-your-own-device world. There’s candy for everyone. Windows Insiders have
already been enjoying the tweaks to the Start menu, integration with Windows
phone, and other aesthetic tweaks. That being said, overall, Windows 10 update
1 doesn’t introduce many significant interface changes – mostly just fit and
finish to Windows 10.
Azure Active Directory join
Conversely, ITPros have been treated to a myriad pined features
– like Azure Active Directory join, the Windows Store for Business, and Mobile
Device Management for online enrollment of desktop machines. These features
enable group policy without VPN, volume license management for apps, private
apps, and provisioning remote devices while securing corporate data.
Windows Hello
Most notable is Windows Hello. This is a developer feature, you
know, since it simplifies the complexities of access; let me explain. At the
heart of authentication are security tokens granted to the user and safely
stored in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), the same hardware-based
cryptography enabling BitLocker. For devices without a physical TPM, Windows
will securely virtualize one.In the recent past, we called the Microsoft Account the Microsoft Passport. We renamed it to simplify consumer understanding of our online properties. Windows Passport is not the same thing, though it shares its name, but we have completely run out of product names and had to re-provision this one. Just kidding.Access to the TPM is enabled only by a suite of controlled APIs we call Passport. Working together, this is a big step to single-sign-on (SSO) nirvana – which, more practically, means I don’t have to keep signing-in to Office 365 every time I click a SharePoint Online link. Passport, however, is gated. Users must provide a personal pin, a personal pin that expires quite quickly; enter Windows Hello.
Windows Hello is a pin management
subsystem of Windows 10. It includes support for passwords, numeric pins,
picture passwords, and biometrics including fingerprint, face recognition, and
iris scanning. It caches your pin, and conveniently prompts for transparent
re-authentication when that variable cache expires. It is a seriously big step
toward authenticated happiness.
It’s important to know that biometrics require special
hardware. The Surface Pro 4 keyboard includes a fingerprint reader; it and the
Surface Book both include Intel’s ImageSense cameras for infrared, facial
recognitions. The Microsoft Lumia 950 and 950 XL both have iris scanners on
board. Meanwhile, our partners are (or shortly will) shipping their own Windows
Hello biometric devices.
Lumia 950 and 950XL
The Lumia 950 and 950 XL Windows Phones include
liquid-cooled 6 and 8-core processors, respectively. No kidding. These little
rocket use the new Microsoft phone dock to enable Continuum-for-phone.
Continuum is a game-changer. With it, a phone physically or wirelessly connects
to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor – treating it like a PC with full Windows
capabilities, including apps like Office 2016 – features, add-ins, keyboard
shortcuts – everything you expect in a PC experience. Note: any phone that does NOT have a USB-C type connector (both the 950 and the 950 XL do) is not likely to support Continuum on Phone. Remember, it's a hardware feature not only with connectivity but also within the chipset. This is a new capability.
Microsoft Band SDK
Since we’re talking about Microsoft hardware, it’s worth
pointing out that the Band SDK now supports Microsoft Band 2 with features
like: streaming data from the band, connecting to multiple bands, creating
interactive tiles, messaging, and personalizing the band – all off-band and
across mobile platforms like Windows, iOS and Android. Friends with the Band is the Microsoft Health
Cloud where wearable data is centrally stored. Developers can use the Microsoft
Health API to request access and use that wealth of telemetry data.
Visual Studio cloud subscriptions
In the past, purchasing Visual Studio meant a significant
up-front investment. For Visual Studio Enterprise, businesses could easily drop
$10k per developer for the MSDN subscription that includes it. Introducing
Visual Studio cloud subscriptions. Now, developers and business can rent Visual
Studio for lower, easier monthly payments ranging from $45 to $250 per month.
For ad hoc teams, smaller businesses, and startups, this can reduce a barrier
of entry to a premium developer experience.
What’s interesting about Visual Studio cloud subscriptions
is the word “cloud” in the name. Why? It’s not just because you download from
the cloud – we’ve always done that. It’s because the entire purchasing
experience is accomplished through the emerging Azure Marketplace.
The Azure Marketplace
The Azure Marketplace started life as the Azure Data
Marketplace, an easy place to purchase hosted data and services from premium
providers, like Bing translator and third-party providers. Today, the Azure
Marketplace is also a central place to purchase almost anything including
Salesforce, Oracle, and (now) Visual Studio 2015. What does this mean? It means
businesses get a single, simple bill for everything from development costs to
virtual machines and SQL Server online.
Visual Studio dev essentials
With Visual Studio 2013, developers were treated to roaming
settings for the very first time. It was a dream – jump from machine-to-machine
and your preferences follow you around like a puppy. This were enabled, in
part, by the Visual Studio profile. Using your Microsoft Account (MSA) sign-in
to Visual Studio and you were good to go. To the developers on the Visual
Studio team, thank you.
The evolving profile
In Visual Studio 2015, even more settings roam and a
developer’s Visual Studio profile was even more important. It also allowed you
to seamlessly access remote source repositories like GitHub and Visual Studio
Online without having to monkey around with a litany of passwords. Plus, almost
every setting roamed for an awesome multi-machine experience. Once snippets
roam, I’m buying the whole team drinks. (Water, of course; with all they ice
and lemon you want – free refills).
Dev essentials benefits
The Visual Studio profile is free – it doesn’t matter if you
are using Enterprise, Professional, Community, or even Express. And now, every
Visual Studio profile qualifies for Visual Studio dev essentials. This is a
toolbox of awesome benefits you get just for using Visual Studio.
The list includes tools like Visual Studio, Code, and even
Parallel for developers using a Mac. The list includes services like Visual
Studio source control, Application Insights, HockeyApp (a 2014 Microsoft
acquisition for cross-platform mobile applications), MacInCloud integration, and
even a $25 monthly Azure credit – yep, you read that right. In addition to all
that, Visual Studio developers get free access to subset of the training
catalogs for PluralSight and Wintellect, HackHands consultation, and priority
support through Microsoft.
Visual Studio Team Services
A rose by any other name is still a rose. Visual Studio Team
Services is the new name of Visual Studio Online. And, I for one could not be
happier. You know how you see some things happen and you think to yourself,
“That won’t last long.” Such was Visual Studio Online. I weighed in, warning
developers will think Visual Studio Online is a browser-based version of Visual
Studio – you know, an online version of Visual Studio, as the name implies. Alas,
I am but a small voice in a cacophonous crowd. And, so, here we are. Good
riddance Visual Studio Online, hello Team Services – our terrific source
control, project management, and automated build offering that was hidden
behind a silly name.Previously, we had Visual Studio Team System. Don’t confuse that old moniker for the desktop tool with the Visual Studio Team Services, its online compliment.
Test manager extension
This is important. Not because of the Test Manager extension
a suite of testing features in Visual Studio and Team Services for a monthly
fee of $52/developer; no. Because we are ushering in a new way to modify the
premium capabilities of Visual Studio without introducing a new Visual Studio
SKU. Remember Visual Studio Test Edition? Remember Visual Studio Online
Advanced? No more. Starting this week, we see Visual Studio getting premium
features simply by adding a Microsoft extension, like Test Manager.
Visual Studio Marketplace
Part of Visual Studio Team Services is the next generation
of the Visual Studio Gallery called the Visual Studio Marketplace. The Visual
Studio Gallery was (is) the go-to place for Visual Studio extensions – both
free and paid. The Visual Studio Marketplace will ultimately replace the Visual
Studio Gallery, enabling not only easy access to extensions, but an easy mechanism
for extension authors to monetize their work. The old Visual Studio Gallery
was, basically, just a download site. It’s worth pointing out that third party, paid extensions will be supported soon.
Application Insights
I have a love/hate relationship with Application Insights.
On one hand, I love having simple access to app metrics. I also love the new
integration with Visual Studio and Power BI. That being said, I am hardly a fan
of any tool that highlights how horribly wrong I can get my code. J No kidding.
Well, anyway, Application Insights is now available for
every type of app, from WPF to web sites and mobile apps on every platform
including iOS and Android. If you can write it, we can handle it. All that data
is available for real-time analysis, as well as alerts, up on the Azure portal
or in your inbox. With a little insight and some developer love, your app
stability will be a feature, not a liability.
Team Foundation Server
It’s still 100% viable for an organization to have an
on-premises source control and project management server. Team Foundation Server update 1 RTM was also
announced this week for download. It’s a long discussion to delineate the delta
between online and on-premises Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, but at
their hearts they are the same.
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is now open source on GitHub. If you
follow Microsoft’s embrace open source software (OSS), this is
probably something you saw coming. Open source means you can learn from our
investment and even submit your own pull request for that new feature.
Open source
Microsoft’s open source agenda is complex. No question it’s
a move motivated by the fact that open source is unswervingly popular, but it’s
also a way of garnering good will in our business choices, good faith in our
code quality, and nod to the thousands of developers who genuinely love
Microsoft and want to contribute in some way – even if it’s just to brag to
their colleagues that they did it.
With .NET, ASP.Net, and now Code open source, Microsoft also
gets the advantage of unexpected innovation and transparency for security
audits that might have otherwise prevented our technology from being selected
by key partners, enterprises, and governments. We aren’t going to stop core
contribution, and we aren’t going to give up our intellectual property, but
we’re as open as a for-profit software company can be. And, it’s awesome.
Extensions
Visual Studio Code now has long-awaited extension support. A
gallery of extensions is available within Code or at visualstudio.com for
developers wanting to make Code do more. Extensions can add additional
features, but can also apply custom themes and language support. It’s easy to
see that the developer community loves Code. With extensions, that’s only going
to grow.
Visual Studio 2015 update 1
And now to Visual Studio 2015 update 1. This is the first
update to Visual Studio 2015 since it went RTM back with Windows 10 in the
summer. But, let me set your
expectations, Visual Studio 2015 update 1 is an incremental update that cleans
up many things and only introduces a few. Nonetheless, let’s enumerate what’s
new.
Universal Windows Platform
Last week, Windows 10 released update 1. Internally, we called
that Threshold 2 – because the first release of Windows 10 was codenamed
Threshold (the one is implied). And, since we can hardly bring ourselves to
type out full words, we simply called it TH2, or sometimes “the November
update”. To you, it’s just Windows 10 update 1.
With update 1, came an update to the Universal Windows
Platform (UWP); the previous version was 10240, the new version is XXX. Windows
apps can support both at the same time. Unlike the .NET framework, UWP is not a
runtime; it is a guaranteed, single API surface across every device that runs
Windows 10. This includes Windows Phone, Desktop, Surface Hub, IoT (Raspberry
Pi), HoloLens, and whatever else the engineers dream up supporting.
This API surface is what enables universal Windows apps.
With Windows 10 (before the update) Visual Studio 2015 (before the update)
supported app development with the UWP SDK. With the update of both Windows 10
and Visual Studio 2015 comes the update to the UWP SDK for TH2 support.
So, what’s new?
Get it in your head that update 1 is a fit and finish
release. The developer story was already good. Now it’s even faster and more
stable. Although Windows 10 update 1 has several consumer-oriented user delight
features, like Windows Hello, the UWP side of things is pretty stable. We’re
basically leaving significant innovations to our next release, codenamed
Redstone.
CSharp scripting
Every C# developer knows that while debugging an
application, you can open Visual Studio’s Immediate Window to write and run
arbitrary code within the context of the current application. It’s brilliant.
Outside of that and a BizTalk feature called inline scripts, however, C# was
trapped within the context of a compiled assembly. Until now.
Aside: it’s worth pointing
out that this technology has been used internally for some time in Azure
solutions, especially on the compute side of the house. It was mostly hidden
from developers, but these solutions drove its development.
With Visual Studio 2015 update 1, developers can how choose
File > New > File > CSharp Script. The resulting *.CSX file can be
executed headless, without compilation, by the new stand-alone CSharp
Interpreter (CSI.exe). It’s the CSharp you love, with type-safety and the .NET
framework, but without the overhead and memory requirements of the .NET
runtime.
The REPL tool
Visual Studio’s Immediate Window can now be executed
stand-alone, too. The new REPL tool was demonstrated in 2009 and developers
have been waiting anxiously ever since. It allows developers to hack out CSharp
code without creating a project or compiling needing to it. This is useful for
all types of developers wanting to iterate quickly. However, the real winner
here is education. Students can write, learn and test code without having to be
first taught about the structure of proper projects. Moreover, this is an
obvious gateway to cross-platform coding. What’s REPL stand for? Read-Eval-Print-Loop. And in Visual Studio’s REPL developers get all the candy that comes with Roslyn – like comprehensive Intellisense. It also allows a slightly expanded syntax of C# to enable important REPL-tasks like seeding and defining methods. NuGet support is coming soon.
XAML designer
For developers, the worst part of development is users.
Everything works so much better until they get involved. Similarly, for the
authors of developer tools, the worst part is developers. Everything works so
much better until they get involved. And, so it is with the XAML designer. The XAML designer enables developers to visually create stunning user experiences in a simple and productive way. One incredible feature of the designer is that it can execute project code (that’s the code written by the developer) within the designer, giving developer/designers a rich design-time experience with the data and behaviors they would expect to see at runtime.
Because developers can write some gnarly project code, the designer’s stability and memory footprint is subject to its quality and immensity of that code. XAML developers know, the designer can crash. You might say, “Just make it work.” But developers chanting that trite repost just highlight their own ignorance in the orthogonal complexities of the subject task.
To address this issue, many developers use the global
setting disabling all project code in the designer. As a result, every design
experience is degraded – even the ones that might not have needed to be. With
Visual Studio 2015 update 1, you don’t need to use this setting. Now, developers
can disable project code on a per-view basis. The all-or-nothing approach still
exists, but that’s more like cracking nuts with a steamroller. The new per-XAML
file setting is a better, precision instrument – and you can toggle it from
within the designer.
Edit and continue
How great is edit and continue in c#? Similarly, XAML
developers can use the Live Visual Tree feature of Visual Studio to select any
element in the XAML tree of a running app. Developers can view and edit the
in-memory property values, seeing what different property values do to the user
experience. Soon, in a forthcoming CTP of Visual Studio 2015, runtime edits will be persisted back to the
actual XAML, much like edit and continue in C#. This workflow helps deliver incredible
productivity to app development.
XAML Behaviors open source
Because developers can declare their user interface, XAML is
incredibly productive, but because developers can declare the logic of their
interface using Behaviors, XAML is amazing. Declaring an application through
XAML means developers get a design-time experience, with visual checks and
parsers to validate their intent as well as their implementation. Behaviors
enable this and give us encapsulation and reuse on an epic scale.Behaviors are now open source and available through NuGet. This is a huge improvement over being an Extension SDK in the Universal Windows Platform. Why? Well, for one, you can learn how to use behaviors by interrogating the open source repository. For two, you can contribute to the behaviors library. And, best of all, the Behaviors SDK will be compatible with UWP apps and no longer give us warnings when we build apps that reference it.
Pull requests hub
There is certainly more candy for developers in Visual
Studio update 1. One worth mentioning is the Pull Request Hub. Interacting with
git repositories prior to update 1 was, basically, a command-line task. But
we’ve embraced git and realize how appropriate it is for certain types of
project. With Pull Request Hub, within Visual Studio Team Explorer, developers can
review, create, assign and reassign pull requests without leaving the comfort
of their IDE. This is a huge and welcome improvement.
Application Insights
You might notice Application Insights has made an appearance
twice in this list. Take that to heart. Application Insights is a big deal in
the Microsoft developer story. This time it’s because of new Visual Studio
integration. Yes, developers can search, filter and share Application Insights
data right from the IDE. We knew that was coming. But, with update 1,
Application Insights events now appear in the Visual Studio Diagnostics Hub as
they occur. This is a boon for developers leveraging these analytics to build
better and more stable applications.
.NET Core 5 RC & ASP.Net 5 RC
Available on Linux, Windows, and OSX, .NET Core is an optimized
implementation of .NET allowing managed languages, side-by-side, across
platforms for modern apps. This week, we announced that .NET Core now includes
networking and localization APIs. Meanwhile, ASP.Net includes localization,
Entity Framework 7 and Lag helpers. All this with top notch tooling inside
Visual Studio.
Aside: the .NET Framework 4.6
(typically called the full framework) on which hundreds of thousands of desktop
applications are written, is the superset of the .NET Core and, together, are
under the umbrella we call .NET 2015 and share compilers and tooling.