Microsoft Connect: Visual Studio 2015 and more!

Published: November 12, 2014 4:37 PM /

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During today's Connect conference, Microsoft has announced a multitude of updates or new products, including Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio Community 2013, and .NET 4.6. For more information, check after the break!

Visual Studio 2015 is the next version of Visual Studio, set to launch next year. Like Windows 10, VS 2015 has a preview available for download right now. The preview has a multitude of features and plugins available, the most notable of these being an Android emulator. The emulator is capable of GPS, screen rotation, zoom, network access, SD cards, and an accelerometer.

In slightly larger news, Visual Studio Community 2013 has been announced. Visual Studio Community is Visual Studio 2013, but completely free for small developers, teachers, and individual users. As Microsoft themselves explain it:

An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.

For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1MM in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

Microsoft .NET 4.6 was also unveiled today, and a preview of it can be downloaded right now. This is part of the future of the Windows Presentation Foundation, as mentioned in an MSDN blog post earlier today. It includes support for transparent windows, and multi-image cursor files. Another post detailing the future of WPF also went live, explaining a roadmap for it. Some of the major goals include supporting modern hardware (such as touch and high density displays), and superior performance. An entire suite of debugging tools for Windows Presentation Foundation applications is also in the works, and will allow developers to change the properties of elements while debugging.

Finally, the .NET server core stack will not only become open source, but also be ported to Mac and Linux, continuing Microsoft's recent attempts to get their products on all platforms, not just Windows. This is only day 1 of Microsoft Connect, and heavy hitters are already being brought to the table! Day 2 of the conference is tomorrow, and if any announcements are made, they'll be posted into a separate article.

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The name's Andrew! I'm a contributor for Tech Raptor who enjoys writing about tech. I mostly cover Microsoft news, but I also enjoy video games. (… More about Andrew