Visual Studio for Mac and other Connect conference news; // 2016

One of the most important conferences for Connect developers (); // 2016 is in full swing, and we present you the results of the last discovery, which was a lot of interesting news!

In addition to the announcements about Microsoft’s collaboration with the Linux Foundation, the unexpected official statement about Samsung and Google joining the .NET Foundation, we are happy to share with you news about updates for Microsoft tools for developers and the release of Visual Studio for Mac , new cloud platform features and full support for Docker, chic announcements for Windows and Office developers!


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Developer and DevOps Tools

First, a little about updating the Visual Studio family and new products in the line.

Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate - release candidate of the new version of the tool is available today . Visual Studio 2017 RC contains both fixes and new functionality that was not previously available in previous versions. As well as this release of Visual Studio 2017 RC includes the ability to develop production solutions.

Team Foundation Server 2017 RTM - today, a new version of the main tool for interoperability between teams is also becoming available. New features have been added to Team Foundation Server 2017 - Package Management, Code Search, Test & Feedback Extensions and Release Management improvements. Additionally, TFS 2017 users can download extensions from the Visual Studio Marketplace and install them into their TFS environment. More details on the Brian Harry blog .

The main news for mobile developers is the announcement of the Visual Studio Mobile Center Preview.
Mobile Center works with iOS and Android applications written in Objective-C, Swift, Java, Xamarin, React Native and brings together cloud services and tools to ensure the life cycle of creating applications for developers whose goal is the rapid development of high-quality mobile applications! Mobile Center provides opportunities for developing, building, testing, monitoring and deploying applications to devices and makes it easy for developers to scale their applications across all platforms and implement the latest and most popular features. To access the preview version, go to the Visual Studio Mobile Center page and register.

And finally, what we all waited for - today at the Connect () conference; // 2016 a preview version of Visual Studio for Mac was announced . Available for download today! Visual Studio for Mac is a complete development environment for creating mobile, cloud, and Mac applications. The first preview release includes support for creating native iOS and Android applications in C # and F # using Xamarin, as well as creating a backend using Azure services, and, of course, supporting ASP.NET Core.



In addition, we demonstrated on the scene a closer integration of Visual Studio with the tools for working with Docker, as well as a serious simplification of development, deployment and DevOps in Visual Studio Team Services for microservice application architecture.

And there were more announcements! Details in the official blog of the team Visual Studio .

Cloud platform

Full availability of Azure Functions . In March 2016, Azure Functions were announced in preview. Today, after the resounding success of the preview version, we announced the full availability of Azure Functions - serverless code to facilitate the scaling of your solutions in the cloud. Details on the link .



Announcement of Azure Bot-as-a-Service . This solution will allow developers to increase the speed of creating bots using the Microsoft Bot Framework, as well as deploy them and run in the Azure cloud. Details on the link .

Azure App Service on Linux (Preview) now supports containers and ASP.NET Core. We provide developers with the ability to use their own Docker container images and extend support for ASP.Net Core applications. More on the link .

Announcements of Azure Container Service (ACS) include support for Kubernetes (preview), DC / OS Upgrade to 1.8.4, Open Source Azure Container Service Engine, Azure Container Registry (preview), Continuous integration and deployment to Azure Container Service (preview) . Read more in the blog .

From December 1, new types of virtual machines will be fully available - Azure N-Series . These machines provide NVIDIA GPUs. And available in the regions of South Central US, East US, West Europe and Southeast Asia. Read more in the blog .

Data processing and storage platform

A preview of the new version of SQL Server on Linux is now publicly available. With this release, Microsoft combines the power of the SQL Server tool for Linux with the support of Docker containers. Access to the public preview version of SQL Server is open from today .



The developers were also told about the availability of the version of SQL Server 2016 SP1 and the upgrades of SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Server Data Tools and Command line tools, which now also support SQL Server on Linux. Additionally announced the release of updated tools and connectors that will allow developers to be more productive with SQL Server on Linux, PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, and Node.js, including the JDBC Driver, which are now 100% becoming open source.

Announced the full availability of Azure Data Lake Analytics - a cloud analytical service for developing and running parallel data processing, with the ability to use U-SQL, R, Python and .Net. One of the main advantages of the service is the lack of management infrastructure and data can be processed on demand, allowing you to scale in seconds and pay only for really used resources. More details.

More details on the official SQL Server blog.

Windows development

Today, Windows is not just the development of traditional desktop applications, but the ability to create solutions that can interact with the user through the usual and natural ways of entering data, namely, speech, pencil, emotions, etc. Windows today is breaking the boundaries between the gaming experience of computer users and the console, and transferring them to a new virtual or augmented reality.

On Connect (); We have demonstrated new Windows features opening up to developers:

Windows added native support for the Appium framework for automated testing of the Windows interface of applications, no matter which application you are building - Universal Windows Platform (UWP) or Classic Windows Platform (eg, WPF, Win32, VB6). And since Windows can be tested using WinAppDriver Service, the application is also available through standard screen tools. To learn more about the Windows Application Driver Service, visit https://github.com/Microsoft/WinAppDriver

The Desktop Bridge allows traditional, Windows desktop applications to take advantage of the new Windows 10 features without the need to change the application code. Using the Desktop Application Converter (DAC), game developers and creators can distribute their current solutions through the Windows Store. Details and functional descriptions of the Windows Desktop Bridge are available at https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bridges/desktop . See examples of applications published with this tool in the Windows Store in the “Powerful PC Software” category at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/collections/fullsoftwareapplications/pc

That's all for today!

And don't forget that the conference is Connect (); // 2016 is not over yet and you are waiting for two whole days of immersion in Microsoft technology!

Where to look?

Live broadcast of the event in English.
Record opening in Russian.
Link to the text translation in Russian.