[Publication] Book on Visual Studio 2013, TFS 2013, .NET 4.5.1 and web development

I am very happy and proud to announce the publication of our book “Visual Studio 2013 – Concevoir et développer des projets Web, les gérer avec TFS 2013”. This book has been co-written by Nicholas Suter (Cellenza), Simon Gilquin (Cellenza), François Merand and me. The preface has been written by Benoit Launay (Product Manager at Microsoft France).

So much work and finally it has been published ! Writing a book is a real adventure and not an easy task. I am very happy that we got it finished.

Here is the table of contents (in French):

• Introduction
• Les principes de l'ALM
• Analyse et Design
• Architecture logicielle de la solution
• Accès aux données avec Entity Framework
• Implémentation de la couche métier
• Développement web avec ASP.NET MVC5
• Services ASP.NET Web API
• Utilisation de Windows Azure pour héberger l’application web
• Pour aller plus loin

You can find the book on the ENI Website, on Amazon and in the FNAC stores :

• http://www.editions-eni.fr/livres/visual-studio-2013-concevoir-developper-et-gerer-des-projets-web/.397a4e8d6196ac564340efa9b58431eb.html
• http://www.amazon.fr/Visual-Studio-2013-Concevoir-développer/dp/2746085380/
• http://livre.fnac.com/a6485349/Jason-De-Oliveira-Visual-Studio-2013

I hope you will take a look, buy it and use it in your daily work ! If you have bought and read it, please let me know what you think. You might see some additional books written by me in 2014, so stay tuned !

[Publication] Book on Visual Studio 2013, TFS 2013, .NET 4.5.1 and web development

[VS2013 - .NET 4.5.1] Visual Studio 2013 Launch Event in Paris

After the launch in New York City two weeks ago, I was this Tuesday at the Paris Visual Studio 2013 Launch event. The event took place the whole afternoon at the conference center of Microsoft France. There were around 500 attendees, including some special guests, such as Brian Harry and Ed Blankenship, who presented all the new features to the audience !

The event was a big success and I was very happy, that the company I work for Cellenza had its own booth. We had changed our logo and website just before the event, so I was happy with the new design, which I find to be quite appealing.

We had a little quiz going and you could win some interesting gifts, there were also free USB keys for people responding to the quiz! You have to have some fun activities to attract people to your booth and winning some goodies always works great.

I was impressed by the number of people responding to our quiz, I think this was a good success. We had the opportunity to meet a good amount of people and to exchange on different subjects.

The agenda was packed with news, announcements and some quite interesting subjects, as you can see below:

• Transforming software development in a world of devices and services,
• New features in Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013
• ALM and Windows Azure
• How to develop great Windows 8.1 applications using Visual Studio 2013
• Deezer : Success of a French music streaming company
• Integrate your GIT projects within Team Foundation Server 2013
• Questions and Responses with Brian Harry, Ed Blankenship and Jean Marc Prieur
• Cocktails

The GIT presentation was done by Michel Perfetti, who is working with me as Manager at Cellenza. I was very proud that Cellenza had been selected as exclusive partner for the event.

Here are the slides in French:

Intégrer vos projets GIT dans Visual Studio Online

[VS2013 - .NET 4.5.1] Visual Studio 2013 Launch Event in Paris

[VS2013 - .NET 4.5.1] Brief summary of the Visual Studio 2013 Launch Event

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

[VS2013 - Visual C#] Visual Studio 2013 Launch Event

Microsoft has made available Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.5.1 and TFS2013 as RTM versions since the 17th October. You may download the trial versions and MSDN subscribers can download the licensed product from the MSDN portal. You can learn more about what is new in Visual Studio 2013 on my blog or on the official what’s new website.

Next month Microsoft is going to launch Visual Studio 2013. The official launch event will be the 13th of November in New York. I have been invited exclusively to assist the event live in New York. This is a great honor since invitations are very rare, so I am very proud of having been chosen. Furthermore, there are only two French partners that have been invited by Microsoft and Cellenza is one of them !

I am going to communicate live from the event on my Blog and on my Twitter and on the Cellenza Blog. You may also assist virtually to the keynote speech using this webpage http://events.visualstudio.com. You are even able to watch the keynote in multiple languages !

I am very excited to participate in the event and I am going to try to share everything I see with you as soon as I can. Please let me know if you go to the event and we might get a drink together.

[VS2013 - Visual C#] Visual Studio 2013 Launch Event

[.NET 4.5.1 - C#] Visual Studio 2013 RC, Team Foundation Server 2013 RC and .NET 4.5.1 RC are now available

The Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 Release Candidate go-live versions are now available !

The Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate can either be installed as new installation, on top of the Visual Studio 2013 Preview version or side-by-side with your existing Visual Studio 2012 installations.

Visual Studio 2013 RC still supports the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 but it does not support Windows 8.1 Preview or Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview anymore. If you want to use either of them you have to install the RTM versions from MSDN or TechNet (more information here).

You can download the Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 Release Candidates from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/2013-downloads

Furthermore, the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Release Candidate is now also available for download with a go-live license, that enables you to deploy 4.5.1 RC applications in production.

This is a major step forward for the next version of the .NET Framework. After testing and trying all the new features, you are now able to deploy your Proof-Of-Concepts to production.

You can download the .NET 4.5.1 Release Candidate from here:

• .NET Framework 4.5.1 RC (an offline installer is also available)
• Visual Studio 2013 RC (which includes the .NET 4.5.1 RC)

You may install it on top of the .NET 4.5 Preview that was released end of June.

There are no additional features since the Preview release, instead all newly introduced features are now finished and should have good quality.

[.NET 4.5.1 - C#] Visual Studio 2013 RC, Team Foundation Server 2013 RC and .NET 4.5.1 RC are now available

[.NET 4.5.1 - C#] New features in the .NET 4.5.1 and Visual Studio 2013 Preview

The next version of the .NET Framework is .NET 4.5.1. It has been published as Preview version as announced yesterday during the BUILD conference. This blog posts aims to present what has been added, modified and improved in this new Framework version.

The .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview is the first update of .NET Framework 4.5. It contains critical fixes, improvements, and opt-in features and is part of the Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 Previews. But it is also available as direct download without the requirement of having an existing .NET Framework 4.5 installation.

Visual Studio 2013 and .NET 4.5.1 language based improvements

The following language based improvements that have been added to the Visual Studio 2013 and .NET 4.5.1 Previews :

• X64 edit and continue is now possible (with some restrictions, but now X86 and X64 are nearly handled the same, which is good news)
• Async/Await debugging has been added (such as support in the Call Stack window, Tasks window, etc…)
• Managed return value inspection has been added (in the Autos and Watch windows it allows for easier return value debugging)
• Windows Store application development improvements (compatibility with Windows 8.1, Win RT improvements, etc…)
• ADO.NET idle connection resiliency has been added (rebuild broken idle connections with SQL databases automatically and transparently)
• ASP.NET application suspension has been added (Idle sites are suspended from CPU activity and are paged to disk)
• On-demand large object heap compaction (instruct the Garbage Collector to compact the large object heap, as part of the natural GC or a forced GC)
• Multi-core JIT improvements (support for dynamically loaded assemblies)
• Consistent performance after .NET Framework updates (application startup performance will be more consistent after a .NET Framework update)

Installation of Visual Studio 2013 and .NET 4.5.1

The installation of the .NET 4.5.1 Preview can be done by installing the Visual Studio 2013 Preview in which case it will be automatically installed with the Visual Studio components. Note that it will replace existing .NET 4.5 installations since it is an in-place upgrade.

• Download the ISO for Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Preview from here (you may also install any of the other version available if needed).

• After downloading the ISO, you may now start the installation. The installation will require a high amount of empty hard disk space (in my example 14GB !!).

   

You may also just install the in-place upgrade directly on your test server without the full Visual Studio development environment. You can download it from here.

You are now ready to start you evaluation of the new features within Visual Studio 2013 Preview and .NET 4.5.1 Preview !

Future language upgrades now also possible via NuGet

Future language updates will be shipped via upgrades and service packs as it is already done today. They will also be available via component specific NuGet packages. This allows for a maximum of flexibility concerning your upgrade strategy. If you do not want to wait until language upgrades are fully available, you may partially upgrade your language components via NuGet packages depending on your specific customer needs.

Furthermore, you can now retrieve NuGet packages for the .NET Framework 4.5.1 and above on Windows Update (it will not work for earlier versions of the .NET Framework). This provides are very easy and efficient way of getting the latest upgrades for the packages that you use. Note that upgrades will only be serviced for NuGet packages that are actually used by your applications.

Conclusion

The .NET 4.5.1 Preview Framework update provides some fixes and multiple  performance enhancements. There are no major language features, but nonetheless those upgrades become very handy and will allow for a more seamless and productive software development experience. I think that the next big language features that we can expect will be around Roslyn, when it will finally be finished and shipped as RTM version. But we will see !

[.NET 4.5.1 - C#] New features in the .NET 4.5.1 and Visual Studio 2013 Preview

[VS2013 - .NET 4.5.1] Preview of VS2013, TFS 2013, .NET 4.5.1 and Windows 8.1 annouced during Microsoft's BUILD conference

Yesterday during the BUILD conference in San Francisco one of the main major news was the announcement of multiple new product versions for you preferred development platform and operation system (Visual Studio 2013, Team Foundation Server 2013, .NET 4.5.1 and Windows 8.1). 

They are in Preview state and you can download them from here:

• Visual Studio 2013
• Team Foundation Server 2013
• .NET 4.5.1
• Windows 8.1

Those are preview version, which means that there is no support and that the final version could still be modified. In the past we have already seen that APIs have been changed and new functionalities been added to final versions.So you should use them for educational purpose only.

I have installed those versions in a VM to be able to test them and to give you some feedback on my blog. I am going to show you some of the new features in action in the next days/weeks. So stay tuned if you are interested in this topic.

[VS2013 - .NET 4.5.1] Preview of VS2013, TFS 2013, .NET 4.5.1 and Windows 8.1 annouced during Microsoft's BUILD conference