A number of announcements came out today from Microsoft on the evolution of the Visual Studio, .NET and ASP.NET platform.
.NET Core Runtime is Going Open Source and Cross-Platform
Microsoft has been moving more of its code to open source frameworks including ASP.NET, Entity Framework, Web API and the C# and VB compilers.
Microsoft announced that the core .NET runtime and libraries are also now going open source. This includes the CLR, Just-in-Time Compiler, Garbage Collector and core .NET libraries.
In addition, Microsoft is going to release an official distribution of .NET for Linux and OS X. This will enable any developer to write .NET applications that run equally well on Windows, Linux or OS X.
New Visual Studio Community Edition
Microsoft is going to release a new version of Visual Studio for free called the Community Edition.
It is now available completely free for:
- Any individual developer working on a commercial or non-commercial project
- Any developer contributing to an open source project
- Anyone in an academic research or course setting (e.g. students, teachers, classroom, online course)
- Any non-enterprise organization with 5 or fewer developers working on a commercial/non-commercial project together
We are making it available for download starting today, and developers can download and start using it immediately. There is no program you need to join to use it – simply visit www.visualstudio.com, click the download button, and you are good to go.
New Visual Studio 2015 Preview with New ASP.NET Features
A new preview version of Visual Studio 2015 has been released with a bunch of new ASP.NET features.
The new ASP.NET features available include new project templates, faster build times, support for xUnit tests, improved intellisense, etc.
JSON Editor Improvements
In addition to new preview versions of Visual Studio 2015, there has also been released a new update to Visual Studio 2013. Included in this package is a new update are improvements to the JSON Editor including JSON schema validation, improved intellisense and duplicate property validation.
New Emulator for Android
Microsoft has also now released a new emulator for Android built into the Visual Studio 2015 Preview environment.
