Visual Studio Offerings Continue Mobile, Cloud Emphasis

New products and services in the Visual Studio line of developer tools focus on capabilities and improvements for working with cross-platform, mobile, and cloud applications. Visual Studio 2017, the next major version of the integrated development environment (IDE), is available as a release candidate, and Team Foundation Server 2017 is generally available. Visual Studio for Mac, a new product geared toward Android, iOS, and .NET development, is in preview. Visual Studio Mobile Center, a portal that integrates existing mobile application life-cycle management services, is in preview. The offerings compete with the plethora of open source tools and technologies regularly arriving.

VS 2017 RC Offered, TFS 2017 Generally Available

Visual Studio (VS), the most popular Windows-based IDE for Microsoft’s platforms, provides graphical tools for designing, coding, debugging, and testing both managed applications, based on Microsoft’s .NET Framework runtime and languages such as C# and Visual Basic, and traditional, unmanaged C and C++ applications. The latest generally available version, VS 2015, also provides tools for building cross-platform Android, iOS, and Windows mobile applications using technology from Microsoft’s Xamarin acquisition and Apache Cordova. (Running an iOS application requires a tethered Mac or iOS device, but Android can be emulated on Windows.) VS also includes extensive integration with Azure to help developers leverage the Microsoft-hosted cloud platform.