[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

[VS Online] Visual Studio Online Monaco

During the Visual Studio 2013 launch event Microsoft announced the global availability of Visual Studio Online and on top of that also a new incubation project with the code name Visual Studio Online Monaco.

This blog posts aims to show you the capabilities that Visual Studio Online Monaco provides in its early stages and how you can to try them out.

Windows Azure Website Creation

First of all we are going to create a Windows Azure website to test and to assess the Visual Studio Online Monaco features. To do that you have to sign in to your Windows Azure account (remember that you have free credits if you have a MSDN subscription).

Use the “Quick Create” option to create a Windows Azure Website in your region for our example. This should only take seconds.

You have to configure the created website to enable modifications from within Visual Studio Online. This is currently only available in Preview mode, so options or behaviors might still change and the service can be canceled at any time. So take caution and do not use this feature for your production websites.

Do not forget to save your changes. You are now ready to test Visual Studio Online Monaco, so lets get started !

Edit your Windows Azure website using Visual Studio Online Monaco

The easiest way of editing your Windows Azure website within Visual Studio Online is by clicking on the button that has been added to the Dashboard tab in the Windows Azure portal. You can find it on the right hand side at the bottom of the following screenshot.

After the login procedure your are presented with the following welcome screen. You may read the 4 Quick Start tips that are displayed to get additional information.

You may now click on the hostingstart.html page to edit it directly within your browser. Yes, the IDE is within your browser in this case ! You do not need to have Visual Studio installed. It will work even from you tablet or mobile phone (even with non-Microsoft operation systems ! This is quite handy if you need to quickly apply basic updates to your websites for example.

As you see you have full color coding in place. you may edit existing files,  create new files, create new folders, upload files, use specific IDE commands and much more. The editor is currently somewhat limited, but in some cases exactly what you need. Note that all your modifications are saved as you type them, no need to save by yourself.

Lets take a more closer look at the menu options on the left hand side.

You have already used the Explore option before. It provides access to the files and folders as well as to the IDE for editing code source.

The Search option allows for searching within your files and your project.

The Git option serves to connect to an existing Git repository within Visual Studio Online or to initialize a new one with just the press of a button.

I have actually initialized a new Git repository, so now I am presented with a commit screen where I need to add a comment and check-in my changes. You see that I currently have selected the master branch. I could also create sub-branches and use the full power of Git. But lets leave it simple for our example.

The last four menu options at the bottom allow me to run and see the output of my changes and to open up a console to execute commands. Here is a list of all the commands that are currently supported.

To conclude our little example you may now open your modified website and you will see that the title of the webpage has been updated as expected.

Conclusion

I have tried to give you a very quick and brief overview of Visual Studio Online Monaco. I hope you are as interested as I am. I will keep you informed when I have additional information and when the preview advances.

Here is a good series of webcasts done by the Channel 9 team :
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Visual-Studio-Online-Monaco

[VS Online] Visual Studio Online Monaco

[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