15 Ways Visual Studio 2015 Enhances App Development

Microsoft’s recently launched Visual Studio 2015 delivers a number of new capabilities that help developers achieve more with their apps across multiple platforms.

Visual Studio 2015 unifies debugging and profiling in a single Diagnostics Tools window, bringing insights about the correctness and performance of your running application into context during development.

Visual Studio Online delivers cloud-based collaboration services for teams to share code, track work and ship high-quality solutions. Team Foundation Server 2015 gives on-premises customers many of the same innovations that are being continuously delivered in Visual Studio Online for agile team collaboration and DevOps.

With the Universal Windows Platform and Microsoft’s Windows 10 core, users can run the same app on any Windows 10 device from phones to desktops. Developers can create these Universal Windows apps with Visual Studio 2015 and the Universal Windows App Development tools.

When a developer has issues in his or her code, a Light Bulb suggests fixes for those issues. All refactoring operations have been moved to the Light Bulb, which developers can access by typing Ctrl+.

Python Tools for Visual Studio is a free, open-source extension that provides the functionality developers need to develop and maintain Python applications in Visual Studio, and then deploy to Windows or Linux servers, or to Microsoft Azure.

Node.js Tools for Visual Studio (NTVS) is a free, open-source extension that turns Visual Studio into a Node.js IDE. Developers can use the full power of Visual Studio to develop and deploy Node.js solutions with a broad range of features: IntelliSense, advanced debugging and profiling, npm integration, unit testing, interactive window, source control, cloud deployment and more.

Whatever tools or programming languages a developer prefers, Microsoft’s Team Foundation Build (TFBuild) 2015 will build their apps for their platforms. Developers can build for Windows, iOS, Android, Java or Linux using the same domain-specific languages (DSL) they use every day on their dev machine.

Application Insights helps developers detect issues, diagnose crashes and track usage in their mobile and Web apps on Azure, Internet Information Services (IIS) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Application Insights is an extensible analytics solution that monitors the performance and usage of live applications. It works with both Web and stand-alone applications on a wide variety of platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, .NET and J2EE.

Visual Studio Code supports more than 30 languages, with syntax highlighting, bracket matching and more. Languages include JavaScript, C#, C++, PHP, Java, HTML, R, CSS, SQL, Markdown (including Markdown preview), TypeScript, LESS, SASS, JSON, XML and Python, as well as many other common file formats. VS Code also understands ES6 syntax elements and semantics.

A lightweight editor with keyboard-centric gestures and multiple cursors means developers never need to reach for the mouse. Developers can open large or small files and focus on their code without distraction. There also are advanced editing features such as multiple cursors, auto-save and more.

IntelliSense describes APIs as you type, auto-completing to increase speed and accuracy. Quick Info tool tips let you inspect API definitions, and “Squiggles” let you know about issues, often showing them as you type.

Developers can diagnose issues with their application with integrated debugging tools for Node.js, TypeScript and JavaScript. They can set breakpoints in their code, break on exceptions, watch variables, step through their code or navigate up the call stack, as well as attach to local running processes.

Developers can embrace modern workflows with the power and flexibility of Git. They also see changed files and diffs, and make commits right from within the editor, and connect with the entire Git universe by pulling and pushing code to any remote—GitHub, Azure Web Apps, Visual Studio Online and more.

Microsoft says it’s one thing to be able to work with any source file, with any Git remote and on your favorite OS. Visual Studio Code enables developers to configure the environment the way they want with support for multiple UI themes, custom key-bindings and more.

Visual Studio Code supports the development workflow for ASP.NET 5 and Node.js applications. It also supports IntelliSense, debugging and more across all supported operating systems. And it supports many popular frameworks such as D3, JQuery, Express, Angular, grunt and gulp.