It is a really great time for developers working on Microsoft technologies. The recent release of Visual Studio 2013 has brought a huge number of productivity improvements that make the development experience even better, proving once again that Visual Studio is the best development environment ever. Despite the fact that there are no significant new features in the programming languages, such as C# and Visual Basic, the tooling has been dramatically enhanced on several sides, keeping backward compatibility with VS 2012 safe.
One major update is that Visual Studio 2013 introduces support for building apps for Windows 8.1. In addition, the support for building apps for the web and the Windows Azure platform has been improved, and many other improvements have been made to code editors and tool windows.
Visual Studio 2013 focuses on productivity, and now allows you to perform a huge number of tasks from within the IDE without the need for external programs. Just as an example, the Server Explorer window now allows you to connect to your Windows Azure subscription and perform a lot of management tasks within Visual Studio without opening the Azure Management Portal.
My new book Visual Studio 2013 Succinctly provides guidance through all the new features in Visual Studio 2013, and I’m sure you’ll find a lot of useful information. I’m extremely excited about this new release and I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback.