Microsoft Delivers First Update For Visual Studio 2013

Microsoft has officially released the final version of Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 (VS 2013.1), little more than two months after it shipped the Visual Studio 2013 product.

Visual Studio 2013 first arrived in November and Redmond delivered a release candidate of Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 in December. Now the devices and services giant has delivered the final version of VS 2013.1, which provides fixes to VS 2013.

Targeted Update

The first update is not a major update. Primarily, it addresses a number of fixes and enhancements across the Visual Studio tool suite. Full details of the changes in the update are available here.

“This is a targeted update, addressing some key areas of customer feedback since the Visual Studio 2013 release,” said S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division in a blog post about the release. “For example, we heard your feedback about running Visual Studio in environments without IE10+, and have made several improvements to this experience in Update 1.”

The update features improvements and bug fixes to Visual Studio 2013 in the following areas: the debugger, C++, IntelliTrace, Visual Studio Test, and XAML Tools.

At the Visual Studio 2013 launch in New York, Brian Harry, a Microsoft Technical Fellow working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server, said there would not be a Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2013 Update 1. “We will include an update of TFS along with the next Visual Studio Update in the spring some time,” he said.

Spring Arrival

In a post this week, Harry said, “The good news (particularly for TFS users) is that Update 2 is very close behind Update 1 and there will be a new version of TFS released for Update 2. We’re just wrapping up feature work on Update 2 this week and will soon be releasing our first CTP [Community Technology Preview]. We’re just beginning the process of polishing, bug fixing, etc., to release a solid update.”

Harry said he will soon provide more detail describing the features in TFS 2013.2. “Our two biggest areas of investment in this release have been Agile Project Management (and general work tracking) and the next increment of Git tooling,” he said. “I’ll also cover the highlights of the VS improvements in VS 2013.2 – there are quite a few.”

Microsoft will be delivering VS 2013.2 this spring, Somasegar said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to tweak Visual Studio Online. Harry said since the company introduced tagging as a lightweight work item “customisation” approach, developers who have tried it have had some consistent requests. One of the top ones was support for querying on tags, so Microsoft rolled that feature into Visual Studio Online. Other requests include the ability to work with tags in the Visual Studio IDE, rather than just in the Web. That feature will be coming in VS 2013 Update 2, he said.

Originally published on eWeek.