Microsoft Expands the Visual Studio Family

At its Connect(); 2016 event this week in New York, Microsoft announced the release candidate of Visual Studio 2017, plus Visual Studio for Mac and other products.

I opined on the weirdness of one of these releases inThinking About Visual Studio for Mac, but Microsoft’s vision for its developer platform—“Any Developer, Any App, Any Platform”—is of course laudable. And with this week’s announcements, it’s really taking big steps outside the Windows comfort zone.

Here’s what Microsoft announced:

Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate (RC). Previously called Visual Studio “15,” this release focuses on productivity improvements, Xamarin integration, support for Docker packages and cloud deployment, performance improvements, and, perhaps most crucially, extensibility. You can read more here.

Visual Studio for Mac Preview. Previously called Xamarin Studio, this release features a new Visual Studio IDE that Microsoft says was “built from the ground up for Mac” and focuses on mobile and cloud development. You can learn more here.

Visual Studio Mobile Center. This new cloud-based hub “brings together multiple services commonly used by mobile developers into a single, integrated service that allows you to build, test, deploy, and monitor cloud attached apps in one place,” Microsoft says. You can find out more here.

Team Foundation Server 2017 and Visual Studio Team Services. Now generally available, these solutions bring Application Insights, Package Management service, Code Search, and third-party commerce to on-premises extensions, according to Microsoft. You can learn more here.

Be sure to visit the Connect(); 2016 page on Channel 9 for hundreds of on-demand videos from the show. No developer is getting left behind.