Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 Preview

Dear friends, we are pleased to inform you that the second preliminary version of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 was released yesterday. Compared to the first update, it includes a number of functional innovations. The release of this update will take place very soon, a preliminary version can be downloaded right now. It should be borne in mind that this update does not have a go-live status and some additions and changes are possible. The most interesting news will be described below.

The preliminary version of the update includes a lot of changes, a full list can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2927432. They relate to almost all aspects of working with Visual Studio and collaboration. The development team paid special attention to innovations that scored a fairly large number of votes on the UserVoice website.

Work Item Tags

TFS 2012.2 included a tagging mechanism that makes it easy to enter categories and quickly find the right work items. The development team received good reviews on this feature and a number of requests to expand these features. This preview release includes new features, such as:

• Searches for tags. You can create queries and save them for reuse. Just as with work item queries, the use of OR and AND conditions is acceptable. Needless to say, it is now possible to create diagrams based on such queries.
• Work with tags directly from Visual Studio. Prior to this update, tagging was only possible from the TFS web interface. Now you can easily tag work items directly from Visual Studio and the Eclipse plugin.
• Work and edit with tags from Excel. Now you can enable the tag column when working with lists of work items.
• TFS REST API extension for working with tags.

Managing a list of tasks and requirements

The development team included in this update a number of improvements related to the management of the list of tasks and tasks.

• Performance Improvements. Navigation between sprints, work groups. Previously, these operations in the web interface led to large requests, now updating pages is much faster.
• Non-working days. Starting with Update 2, it will be possible to set non-working days (weekends, holidays) and they will be excluded from the calculations of the main graphs, such as burn down chart.
• Configurable start dates for job diagrams. Now graphs and charts will show accurate data.

Graphs and Charts

Visual Studio 2013 includes new features for quickly building graphs and charts. Update 2 also includes the following changes:

• The ability to place any chart on the project home page, so that progress can be seen more clearly.
• Setting the colors of diagrams, for a more visual representation of important data.

Export test plans to HTML

Now you can export your test plans in HTML format, for example, for printing, discussions with people involved in the project but not having access to TFS. You can select the level of detail when exporting.

Git Version Control Improvements

A lot of the attention of the Visual Studio development team is paid to the level of integration with the Git version control system. The team is working on a number of improvements, some of which are already included in Update 2. Including this:

• Support for such well-known commands as git blame, git amend directly from Visual Studio.
• Posting changes to multiple git repositories. Team Explorer now understands that there can be several repositories of "receivers" and do pull / push.
• Discard commit changes. Now you can revert changes if these changes were made, for example, by mistake.
• Displays the progress of operations with Git. Now it is possible to more clearly observe the percentage of the completed operation with the repository, and if necessary, cancel it.
• Several bugs were also fixed.

In addition to the changes associated with collaboration, this update also added new features of the Visual Studio environment, including those related to web development.

New item and project type SASS

LESS support was added in Visual Studio 2013, and SASS support will also be included in update 2 . The SASS editor has the capabilities of IntelliSence, colorization, annotation, information about the selected tag, syntax validation, transition to the definition, and other important functions that make working with this language in Visual Studio easy and efficient.

New item and editor for JSON files

The JSON format has been added to the type of supported project elements. It supports parsing, colorization, convolution of blocks, and other options.

Option to create remote Azure resources for web projects

When creating web projects, you can specify the option “Create remote resources”. By checking this box, you can set the necessary configuration options and publish your project immediately ready for use with Azure.

Changes in the MVC template for "one-page" web projects

Visual Studio 2013 includes the so-called “Single Page Application (SPA) type of web project. Added support for two-factor authentication using Microsoft.AspNet.Identity 2.0-beta1 . Also in this template are simplified bulky AJAX authentication mechanisms.

Expanded Intellisence Support for Knockout

Support for custom extensions for Knockout based on the syntax “ko-vs-editor viewModel:” ”has been added to the Visual Studio editor. This mechanism will simplify the linking of view models on the page.


Also, support for nested view models has appeared, which allows you to track their hierarchy when working with properties.

URL picker for HTML, Razor, CSS, LESS, and SASS pages

In Visual Studio 2013, there was no tool for selecting URLs when working with various types of project elements. Now you have the ability to specify URLs more accurately and make fewer mistakes:

Support for ASP.NET MVC 5.1.1, ASP.NET Web API 2.1.1, and ASP.NET Web Pages 3.1.1

The CTP2 update includes support for new versions of the main ASP.NET web technologies and corrects a number of errors of previous versions.

Conclusion

The above list is not final, and perhaps a number of new features will be included in the release. For a complete current list of innovations and fixes, please visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2927432 . We hope that many developers will like the new features and make your work easier and more efficient. We remind you that now you can download Visual Studio , get acquainted with the possibilities from the documentation and register with Visual Studio Online.