DEVOPSdigest

Microsoft Corp. reinforced its commitment to providing the best experience for any developer, on any device or platform, with several new and updated developer tools and programs from Visual Studio, Azure, Office and Windows, including many new free offers.

“As a developer company we want to empower developers with open and flexible technologies that enable innovation on their terms,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft. “The additions of Visual Studio Code beta, the free Visual Studio Dev Essentials program, and .NET Core RC for Linux, OS X and Windows show that Microsoft is now the company working hardest for all developers.”

Microsoft announced the immediate availability of Visual Studio Dev Essentials, a new free program designed to provide any developer with everything needed to create applications on any device or operating system, using their technology of choice. The program provides easy access to popular Microsoft developer services, tools and resources as well as several new benefits to help developers get started building apps. Visual Studio Dev Essentials benefits will include access to Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Code and new Visual Studio Team Services; priority forums support; Parallels Desktop for Mac; training from Pluralsight, Wintellect and Xamarin; a $25 monthly Azure credit coming early next calendar year; and more.

Making it even easier to access Microsoft’s developer tools, the company also introduced Visual Studio cloud subscriptions, which offer Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Enterprise on a monthly or annual basis through a new Visual Studio Marketplace. The new marketplace provides a central location for developers to find and install components that extend the Microsoft development platform.

The company also announced the general availability of the Microsoft Graph, offering developers a consistent way to access data, intelligence and APIs within the Microsoft cloud and with a single authorization token. With the Microsoft Graph, developers can tap into the collective power of the Microsoft cloud to create smart, people-centric applications that help companies and end users achieve more with contextual insights. Any developer capable of making an HTTP request can call the API from any platform.

Also now available is Azure Service Fabric in public preview, making it easy for developers to build and operate microservice-based applications at scale that fully integrate with Microsoft Azure and Visual Studio. The preview includes support for .NET development on Windows Server, with Linux support expected in 2016.

Microsoft’s developer platform is open by design, allowing developers to target any device and platform, including iOS, Android, Linux and Windows. The company released new versions of popular tools that further enable developers to quickly create innovative apps and services.

Microsoft released Visual Studio Code beta as an open source project, available on GitHub. Visual Studio Code is an advanced code editor and part of the Visual Studio family that runs on Linux, OS X and Windows, and has been already downloaded more than 1 million times in preview. The new beta version includes a new extension model with a gallery of extensions for additional features, themes and language support.

The company also delivered release candidates (RC) of .NET Core 5 and ASP.NET 5 for Linux, Windows and OS X. With this implementation of the .NET Core for any operating system, developers can start using it in production environments.

Microsoft empowers enterprise development teams with tools for agile and DevOps practices including Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online. The company introduced Visual Studio Team Services, an enhanced and rebranded version of the Visual Studio Online service with 3.6 million existing registered users. Microsoft demonstrated the extensible architecture of Visual Studio Team Services by showing a broad catalog of partner extensions available in the new Visual Studio Marketplace, as well as Microsoft’s own extensions.

Microsoft also extended its DevOps solutions into more mobile development scenarios for Windows, Android and iOS. This includes the ability to host cloud builds for mobile applications with cross-platform build capabilities for iOS (in partnership with MacinCloud) and Android. The addition of HockeyApp to the Microsoft DevOps solution will now enable mobile apps beta testing, user feedback and crash analytics in the DevOps cycle.