Chapter 1. A Quick Tour of Visual Studio 2015
In This Chapter
The Visual Studio Product Line
The Many Faces of a .NET Application
Developing Windows 8/10 Clients
Creating Web Applications with ASP.NET 5
Visual Studio 2015 and the latest version of the .NET Framework introduce new features that address modern, mobile-first/cloud-first development concerns such as cross-platform development, adoption of open standards, and transparency through open source. This latest version also continues to improve on existing developer experiences when writing code for the web, Windows, Office, database, and mobile applications. The 2015 product allows developers to really increase their range when building modern applications that users demand. Some highlights for the 2015 release include the following:
Developer productivity enhancements in the code editor, including touch support
Cross-platform mobile development for Windows, iOS, and Android
Modern, unified web development with ASP.NET 5
Cloud-ready integration to ease development and deployment
Integration of the new, open source “Roslyn” compiler for VB, C#, and now TypeScript
Easier, faster data development across web, Windows, Windows Phone, and Windows Store using Entity Framework 7
Shared projects for C# and JavaScript to make sharing code between applications easier
Redesigned version of Blend for creating beautiful user interfaces (UIs) with XAML
Enhanced IDE support for building JavaScript solutions with object-oriented TypeScript language (a superset of JavaScript itself)
Open source of many .NET elements including the compiler, the .NET Core, TypeScript, ASP.NET, and more
This chapter covers the core makeup and capabilities of Visual Studio 2015. We first help you sort through the product choices available to .NET developers. We then compare the .NET programming languages. The remaining sections of the chapter cover the many possibilities open to .NET programmers, including building web, Windows, cloud, data, and mobile applications. Our hope is to give you enough information in this chapter to get the full picture of what is available to you when you build solutions using Visual Studio.
Note
Part I, “Introducing Visual Studio 2015,” is broken into three chapters. This chapter provides a snapshot of all things Visual Studio. Chapter 2, “The Visual Studio IDE,” is an introduction to getting the tool installed, running it, and creating a first project. It also familiarizes you with the basics of the IDE. Chapter 3, “The .NET Languages,” is a quick primer on coding constructs in Visual Basic and C#. It also covers general programming against the .NET Framework.