What's new in Visual Studio .NET 2013

Introduction  

As per know every time Microsoft ships Visual Studio, brings a lot of new stuff either in tooling, core, service .. etc. In this article I wanna mention some of the cool stuff the Microsoft shipped in Visual Studio .NET 2013 Preview.

Background

In the past Microsoft shipped Visual Studio each ~2 years

1. Visual Studio.NET 2002
2. Visual Studio.NET 2003
3. Visual Studio.NET 2005
4. Visual Studio.NET 2008
5. Visual Studio.NET 2010
6. Visual Studio.NET 2012 

For more extra details please check wikipedia

And as we know Nuget is a great way for manage packages and their dependencies, so Microsoft thinking differently - specially in web - this time instead of waiting the whole 2 years, and surprise and drop everything on you, every 6 months 'll ship a new stuff via NuGet as package, coz all we know web is faster than visual studio.

 And here some of the new stuff the shipped into the latest release of Visual Studio:

• Edit & Continue in 64-bit, finally after waiting for 8 years Visual Studio include the edit and continue during debugging in 64-bit.
• Method Return Value Inspection, now we can access the return value of a function while debugging in Auto Windows as well as Immediate Window.
• Async Debugging Improvement, including enhancements to Call Stack and Task Window, it's also support for Store Apps, Web Apps and Desktop Apps in Windows 8.1
• Windows Store Development Enhancement 

• Convert System.IO.Stream to IRandomAccessStream, allow much easier to interop with exsiting .NET code
• Better exception support for WinRT APIs  (System.Exception.Message, System.Exception.StackTrace)
• WinRT type enhancements (Nullable value types in WinRT structs)

• Entity Framework/ ADO.NET Connection Resiliency

• Provide reliable connection to Azure Databases
• Automatically retry/reconnect broken connection
• Provide great experience for connected devices

• ASP.NET App Suspension

• Enable low latency, high density  websites for private cloud.
• Shipping as a part of IIS 8.5 in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview
• Provisioned through the Idle Worker Process Page-out capability in IIS

• On demand Large Object Heap Compaction
• Multi-Core JIT Improvements

• Minimize application startup time on multi-core CPUs
• Now support for ASP.NET websites
• Enabled automatically for ASP.NET app

Also there a some improvements in the IDE itself, such as

• Colorize the icons in Solution Explorer
• New design for Team Explorer
• Scroll bar map mode

Also there are major improvements in web development such as

•  One ASP.NET

• Unified Dialog
• Scaffloding for everyone
• WebForms, MVC, WebAPI all together
• OWIN which new Extensible Identity System

• Browser Links, which a great feature allow IDE connected with the browser via SignalR hub
• Brand new HTML editors
• JavaScript & CSS editors improvment, so the WebEssencials become out of the box
• Supporting CoffeScript, CSS Less .. etc

Points of Interest

There 're many super exciting things shipped with Visual Studio.NET 2013 Preview and much more in the RTM release, So if you 're interesting to start with the cool IDE please check this link.