Visual Studio 2013 RC

Tools for Visual Studio 2013 RC

The New RC 2013 Visual studio is ready and you can download it from the below mentioned location “Download”.  The Visual Studio 2013 RC express edition is free and can be downloaded from the MSDN site.  There are a couple of new tools are introduce that are required and are very helpful. Here we are going to see the discussion about some of the new tools.

1. One ASP.NET  : To starts with “The One ASP.NET”  Now the template to select any Web application is a part of One ASP.NET tool where you can select the various application template and even select the technology  as well for example web form or MVC.

You can also select various configuration related setting directly from the consecutive windows. This will make the life of the developer more simple and easy compare to the earlier version of the Visual studio.

2. Signal-R Channel between the Browser and Visual Studio.

Remember this issue when each time you make a change in the code and you want it to reflect it in the browser you have to switch to the browser and need to refresh the page. Now you can take a deep breath and leave this task to the Visual studio.  This feature will allows the developer to link the browser to the visual studio directly so that you can refresh any browser page from the visual studio menu directly. This is using the Signal R tool.

3.  New HTML Editor

To Cope up with MVC Razor syntax and new asp editors the HTML editor of the Visual studio is now refreshed. Here you can easily use the HTML5 standard tags. There is also improvement in area like intellisence and JqueryUI and some other JQuery tools. But for some issues the legacy editor is still used in the application. You can set various settings for the HTML editor using 

Tools >> Options >> text Editors. The Window will allow you to configure the HTML editor as per your setting.

4. Scaffolding

Unlike many other language like Java or Ruby there was a need to have a strong Scaffholding which will lead to the easier and faster development of commonly used task in the application. This is now addressed by the feature called Scaffolding.  This is completely new as we have seen in the earlier version for MVC. There are some new templates are added. The MVC 5 support scaffolding are also added in this release.

5. MVC 5

MVC5 is now a part of the Visual studio 2013 RC, a lot of improvement is done to integrate it with the tradional asp web forms application. The New MVC5 template is now part of the one ASP.net where an MVC application is created by selecting the MVC option.

6. New MEF ( Microsoft Entity Framework)

The latest version if the MEF is released with Visual Studio 2013 RC the version number is 6.0 RC1.  This is also available in the NUget package which you can download from the below mentioned location. “Download”.

7. ASP.NET Identity

A new Identify framework is present in the ASP.net which is called asp.net Identity. The maintenance if the user related information is now easier to handle and you can even store the data in some other store rather than SQL Server. Some important part of this Identity is listed below…

One ASP.NET Identity system

• ASP.NET Identity can be used with all of the ASP.NET frameworks such as ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, Web Pages, Web API and SignalR

Ease of plugging in profile data about the user

• When you create new users in your application, it is now easy to add extra information about the user. For eg.. if you wanted to add a Birthdate option for users when they Register an account in your application.
• ASP.NET Identity uses Entity Framework Code First and it is possible to extend the POCO classes.

Persistence control

• By default the ASP.NET Identity system will store all the user information in a database. ASP.NET Identity uses Entity Framework Code First to implement all of its persistence mechanism.
• If your application requirements are that this information might be stored in a different storage mechanism such as SharePoint, Azure Table Service, No Sql databases etc. it is now possible to plug in different storage providers.

Unit testability

• ASP.NET Identity makes the web application more unit testable. You can write Unit Tests for the parts of your application that use ASP.NET Identity

Simple Role Provider

• There is a Simple Role providers which lets you restrict access to parts of your application by Roles. You can easily create Roles such as “Admin” and add Users to Roles.

Claims Based

• ASP.NET Identity supports claims-based authentication, where the user’s identity is represented as a set of claims. There is a Claims

External Logins 

• You can easily add external logins such as Microsoft Account, Facebook, Twitter and Google to your application store the user specific data in your application using this system.
• You can also add login functionality using Windows Azure Active Directory and store the user specific data in your application using this system.

When upgrading from Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 to Visual Studio 2013 you will take advantage of a refreshed and simplified environment with enhanced performance without any additional hardware requirements. Some of these core enhancements make use of capabilities that are only present in the latest versions of Windows and might require you to upgrade to a supported operating system.

This was a brief information about the Visual Studio 2013 RC tools. You can Refer MSDN for more details. Please provide your valuable comments and suggestion on this.

Thanks
Anil Kumar Pandey
Microsoft MVP, Microsoft MCC, DNS MVM