Microsoft releases Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 Community Technology Preview

Ron

Microsoft releases Community Technology Preview for Visual Studio 2013 Update 2

A Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 has been released, just two and a half weeks after Microsoft made Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 available for download. Even then, we knew that Update 2 was being worked on, but the speed with which this preview has been released is still quite impressive.

 This is a fairly major update and there have been a large number of changes and additions. While there are changes to be found in areas such as Testing Tools, Release Management, Debugger, Profiler, Diagnostics and IntelliTrace, the most attention seems to have been lavished on Team Foundation Server:

  • The portfolio backlogs have performance improvements during web access navigation.
  • You can query on tags in Visual Studio and through web access.
  • You can apply tags to work items in Visual Studio.
  • You can apply permissions for who can add new tags.
  • REST API is available for work item tracking tagging.
  • You can edit tags in the Excel add-in for Team Foundation Server.
  • You can configure non-working days, and these are excluded from burndown charts.
  • Cumulative Flow Diagram start dates are configurable.
  • Lightweight charts can be pinned to project or team homepages.
  • You can customize the colors in lightweight charts.
  • The look and feel of the project and team homepage is updated.

The update also fixes a number of issues that were found in Update 1:

  • Visual Studio 2013 Code Analysis check-in policy does not trigger on website.
  • A Security.VerificationException is raised on a custom event handler if IntelliTrace is enabled.
  • Visual Studio crashes when loading a corrupted IntelliTrace file.
  • When you open webpages by using the internal Visual Studio Web Browser, you will no longer receive JavaScript errors.

If you are interested in checking out the latest version of Microsoft’s development tool, grab yourself a copy from the download link below.