Barbaric Tip of the Week is a weekly series whose main purpose is to share tiny bits of knowledge that I find specially useful and interesting.

I just watched the Connect 2015 keynote and it was awesome! They have announced so many things and there’s so much more stuff that is just around the corner! Exciting Times!!!

“I challenge you all here to excel, to bring about the changes you want in the world. Keep pushing and never give up. Welcome to Connect.”

BOOM! That was Stephen Hawking introducing this year’s Connect Conference and the many cool announcements that came with it.

Here is a brief summary for those of you that can’t free 2 hours of your time:

ASP.NET 5 and More

• The Keynote started with Scott Hanselman showcasing ASP.NET 5 and other varied improvements
  • ASP.NET 5 Release Candidate 1 is now avaiable!
  • File new project, try to add a javascript file via NuGet and NuGet recommends you to use Bower the front-end package manager
  • You drop static code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) in your web project, refresh the browser and it is automatically updated
  • You update some C# code in a controller, refresh the browser and it is automatically updated, no need to compile, ASP.NET handles it for you
  • Easily add Application Insights to your web project to get awesome telemetry out of the box with minimum configuration
  • Easily run load testing in Azure and test your app with a hundred thousand users
  • Publish your web app to everything, including docker.
  • Run .NET on a linux machine, compile apps to dlls and native
  • ViSual Studio update 1 comes at the end of November and lets you access Application Insights from within Visual Studio

Visual Studio

• Visual Studio for every developer on every platform
  • Windows, iOS, Android, Mac
  • .NET, C++, JavaScript, php, python, R, Cordova, Unity
• Visual Studio vNext, the Next Version of Visual Studio
  • With a new setup and install that is low weight (under 100 mb) with a component based architecture where you install just what you need
  • You can save setups, and then share and reuse them later
  • You get available previews directly within Visual Studio. So for instance if the C# team releases a preview from C# 7 you can install it right away and start using it. The preview would install side by side and wouldn’t screw your base Visual Studio install.
  • New “Open Folder Option” that lets you open a folder that has source code files and start working with it without the need for solutions or project files (yeeeeeeeah!)
  • The new Navigate to Option let’s you go to a method or a member within a class across all files in your project
  • C# 7
    • new overload for the is operator to support pattern matching
    • more cool stuff from F#, compile time null checking, greater control on memory, new code doesn’t require new CLR, C# is being developed on the Roslyn GitHub repo
  • All the announcements from the Visual Studio team
• Visual Studio Code Beta announced on every platform
  • Awesome support intellisense, debugging (node, dotnet, etc), highlighting etc
  • TypeScript and Angular 2 + node.js
    • Start using future JavaScript features now (ES6, ES7, decorators, async/await even on node, etc)
    • Better tooling powered by static typing, errors, go to reference, find all usages, refactorings, etc
  • Autosave that integrates well with front-end pipeline to run build tasks, etc
  • New VSCode extensibility
  • Video from the Angular team that is working on Angular2 with TypeScript and Visual Studio Code. WAT. This video was super surreal.
  • Visual Studio code becomes OSS on github (erich gamma does that live)
  • Extensibility story: Visual Studio Code with Go, Intellisense and debugging. The community rallies and brings the best support for Go that exists at the moment to Visual Studio Code
• Visual Studio Online
  • Change name from Visual Studio Online to Visual Studio Team Services (it is not just an online editor)
  • Code repository (git, github, external git, tfs)
  • Build and deploy (CI, CD, build pipelines, many extensions with defaults, java, android, node, gulp, npm, etc)
  • Built-in load testing 100000 users (ensure UX), painless, it can be integrated with build pipeline, don’t deploy to production if you have a lot of latency. Completely integrated with Visual Studio
  • Release management
    • policies for development teams, create many environments, dev, staging, prod, manage lifecycle in an integrated way
    • you can even integrate release management with other build systems like jenkins or team city
  • Application insights
  • Jakob Ehn has a new book on ALM with Visual Studio 2015 by the by

Mobile-First and Cloud-First

• Target any device:
  • Native (xamarin), web, hybrid (cordova)
  • NET/C#, HTML/JS, C++
• Windows 10 Apps
  • 110M devices 190+ countries, 2x downloads, 4x revenues, more SDKs with new monetization services and options
  • Universal Windows Platform (one app, one source code for all windows devices, desktop, mobile, tablet, xbox, hololense, MS band)
  • XAML responsive design with adaptive triggers (continuum lets you run an app from your phone into a large screen)
  • Great profiling tools, edit and continue, will be enabled for XAML as well
  • Window 10 SDK update the 30th November
• Xamarin (Native iOs, Android, Apple Watch)
  • Awesome Xamarin extension for VS
  • Android designer and also iOS storyboard-based designer inside Visual Studio
  • With Visual Studio update 1 we’ll get a new template PCL for iOS, Android and Windows, 80% code sharing using C# for al these platforms
  • Many templates for Xamarin to get you started: iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, etc
  • Great connectivity between Visual Studio and mac agent that builds the app. You’ll be able to connect multiple VS instances to the mac building machine
• Cordova (hybrid iOs, Android)
  • Awesome Visual Studio Apache Cordova tools extension
  • Use your favorite web dev tools to build hybrid apps (angular, knockout, react, etc)
  • Easily install plugins, great wrapper over apache cordova CLI tools (plugins let you access mobile phone APIs via JavaScript)
  • Lots of templates to get you started: ionic, onsen, etc
  • Push app updates to your users directly bypassing the app store with CodePush. You can integrate this as part of your CD pipeline.
  • Visual Studio Code also has awesome support for Cordova
    • on a mac, you can run your apps quickly on iOS
    • also android apps with a new android emulator that is coming soon
• Great CI and CD story for android, ios, windows with Visual Studio Team Services (mobile devops)
  • Microsoft bought HockeyApp - deploy betas, collect crash reports, collect feedback, etc - and integrated it seamlessly with Visual Studio Online

Cloud Services

• Microsoft leading cloud movement
  • hyper-scale footprint
  • 28 regions around the world more than AWS and google combined
  • Azure is experiencing a lot of growth and has great momemtum
  • Enterprise customers but also 40% of the revenue comes from startups and ISVs
• Customer case: Healthcare IoT solution that tries to save lives in hospitals by improving hand higyene
  • IoT (movements sensors and use of dispensers)
  • PoC in 6 weeks
  • VSO from waterfall to Agile and scrum
  • 10000 devices 2M events a day
  • use IoT to save tens of thousands of lives every year
• Azure Service Fabric Public Preview (microservice based apps at tremendous scale)
• Azure Graph API General Availabiliy (one REST based endpoint that devs can use to interact with Office 365 and AAD in an integrated and secure way. ISV apps or internal enterprise applications)

Visual Studio Subscriptions

• MSDN subscriptions as usual (you get everything you need tools, azure credits)
• New Visual Studio Cloud Subscriptions, subscribe to VS monthly or anually, get started with minimal costs
• Free subscription called Free Visual Studio Dev Essentials
  • everything you need to create apps that run on any device or OS
  • includes VS community edition, VS code, access to Visual Studio Team Services and $25 per month of Azure
  • training (3 months pluralsight, etc)
  • tools (3 months parallels, etc)

And that was pretty much it! Watch the keynote if you get the chance, and known that there’s also a bunch of more specific sessions that may be of interest to you on Channel 9.

Have a great rest of the week!! :)