A few weeks ago, during TechEd, Brian Harry announced that Visual Studio 2013 and TFS 2013 would be available at the Build Conference.
Today, during the Build Keynote, Steve Balmer announced the general availability of the preview bits, including a Go Live license, you can download them here: http://www.microsoft.com/click/services/Redirect2.ashx?CR_CC=200234020
Here is a blog post from the VS Product team with information on how you can provide feedback about this new version: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2013/06/26/visual-studio-2013-preview-available-now.aspx
So what is new?
- Portfolio Management: They are introducing new work items that would be parents to a User Story: Goal -> Initiative -> Feature -> User Story. This is introduced especially to support large organizations that have lots of different teams working on different part of a solution that rolls up to a larger project.
- Git will be available on-premises. It currently is only available on TFS Service, but starting with TFS 2013 you will be able to decide between TFS Version Control and Git when you start a new team project
- Even more MTM functionality on the web. They added some Test features to Web Access with TFS 2012 Update 2, and they are taking that further. This enables test management across other operating systems where MTM could not be installed. It also allows you to manage test cases from production environments where you would not normally install MTM.
- Pending changes window is back!
- Revamped Team Explorer
- New coding indicators that easily show you your method dependencies, whether your changes break your unit tests, and more.
- Cloud Load testing – This one is huge! You will be able to create a load test and tell it to run in Azure without having to setup a test rig locally (test controller, test agent).
- They bought InRelease: http://www.incyclesoftware.com/inrelease/ and they are incorporating it within TFS. It will allow you to manage deployments to different environments, including manual & automated gates and workflows that should be followed as part of the release process.
- Team Room: This gives you a way to keep all project-related chatter and notifications in one place within your team project.
Go download the bits and take them for a spin!