I have had the honor to participate during the Visual Studio 2013 Launch event yesterday the whole day. And what an exceptional event it was !!! Everything was planned very well and the show was amazing ! This is New York style, I can tell you that I was quite impressed !
The event was invitation only and there were around 200 attendees. Cellenza was the only French partner present. Since I was invited personally with Arnaud Hego, I am happy to give you a brief summary of what has been announced and what has been shown. I will then try to get into more detail in the next weeks and do dedicated blog posts for the most important and most interesting new features.
The first surprise was that all participants got a Surface Acer W510 as present !! It had been customized to contain our names at the back and on the front as a desktop background as well as an installed application with multiple information on the event (schedule, speakers, new VS2013 features, etc…).
We had breakfast and then everybody got to the main hall where the keynote took place. This was an impressive stage with animations. Very entertaining !
S. Somasegar, the corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, was the speaker for the keynote, which was streamed live to the internet. He announced all the new features and asked other members of Microsoft to go into more details and show demos. The whole keynote was quite refreshing, because they did not only present Powerpoint presentations, instead they showed the new features directly within Visual Studio 2013. You can find his blog post on the Visual Studio 2013 Launch here. Channel 9 has also a very interesting Video that does a recap on what has been announced, you can see it here.
Here is what has been announced and demoed during the keynote in the morning:
- Visual Studio 2013 and .NET 4.5.1 are now globally launched and available for purchase and download on MSDN, they are now fully supported and you may use them in your production environments
- Visual Studio Online is now also officially available (formerly known as Team Foundation Service)
- Erich Gamma (Gang of Four) showed a demo of Visual Studio Online Code Name "Monaco" (look here for more information)
- Scott Guthrie showed how Windows Azure and Visual Studio 2013 work perfectly together and how this can be an asset to business applications
- Scott Hanselmann showed how ASP.NET Web Development has been optimized and streamlined with Visual Studio 2013
- Xamarin ships with Visual Studio 2013 with benefits for MSDN subscribers, it provides Visual Studio add-ins so that you can develop your iOS, Android and Windows apps all in a single solution using pure C# code (look under http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-partner-globally/)
- Jay Schmelzer explained how to create Office 365 Cloud Business Apps using the new dedicated project template that has been added to Visual Studio 2013
- Brian Harry spoke about how to enable continuous delivery, what a modern lifecycle with DevOps lloks like, how to do loadtests online or in the cloud and how release planning and management that has been added to Visual Studio 2013
- We also saw Visual Studio Online Application Insights which is in a very early development stage and which can be tested as closed Customer Preview
The afternoon was dedicated to breakout sessions with Scott Guthrie on Windows Azure and Brian Harry on ALM and continuous delivery. I had the opportunity to speak to Brian and to talk about his intervention during the launch event in Paris the 26th of November together with Cellenza. He is going to speak together with Michel Perfetti, so we had the opportunity to getting to know each other. He is quite a friendly guy. I am looking forward to seeing him at the end of the month.
The end of the day was brilliantly finished by a party in the Penthouse of the dream hotel in New York City. The Microsoft teams showed some innovative projects and all participants had a great time getting to know each other and exchanging on all the new features that were presented during the day.
You see that there is an enormous amount of new features that Microsoft pushed through Visual Studio 2013. I am going to write some dedicated blog posts in the next weeks so stay tuned if you are interested in seeing those features in action.
[VS2013 - .NET 4.5.1] Brief summary of the Visual Studio 2013 Launch Event
