What’s new in Visual Studio 2015 and ALM 2015

I’m off to Europe for the Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo and the Xamarin Hack Day in Slovenia.  Of course I’ll be talking about Visual Studio 2015 and all things mobile.  At SSW we’ve been using Visual Studio 2015 on a few projects and it’s a bigger change than I expected.

Thanks to a new/refreshing/cool/awesome change of attitude from Microsoft, we see them embrace the winning tools (AngularJS, Bower, Grunt, NPM, etc.) in the web development space, and now they are just built into the next version of Visual Studio.

The open sourcing of .NET Core 5 and ASP.NET 5, along with the release of the free Visual Studio Community Edition and the upcoming release of Windows 10 for all devices, makes for some very exciting times ahead.

I am really impressed with the new Code Lens because of great value you can now get from source control history:

I love the improvements with Intellitrace and the awesome visual debugging experience you get with the new Diagnostics Tools

I think the PerfTips will be really helpful in finding slow code:

The big game changer will be when Windows 10 is released, because when we create a project we won’t be creating a project just for Windows Phone and Windows metro apps like we do today.

Instead we will be creating apps for potentially 6 platforms in one go (and 8 platforms if we include Android and iOS, assuming Xamarin turns out the way I’m hoping).

You can use Visual Studio 2015 now (if you’re brave enough to use the CTP). This is guaranteed to make you even more productive.  I feel lucky that we get to develop on Visual Studio, the best IDE for developing software.