With the introduction of Visual Studio 2013, Microsoft has provided us with new features that are intended to make application development easier along with testing and deployment.
The new version of Visual Studio 2013 has enabled developers to perform even better and easier than was possible with the earlier versions. They enjoy a better functioning with the following features:
- Edit and Continue in 64-bit
- Method Return Value Inspection
- Multi-Core JIT Improvements
- Async Debugging Improvement
- Entity Framework/ ADO.NET Connection Resiliency and so on.
- Also enhancements have been added to the IDE itself, such as:
- Colorize the icons in Solution Explorer
- New design for Team Explorer
- Scrollbar map mode
Some more new features in Visual Studio 2013
With Visual Studio 2013, Microsoft has included a "Sign In" button that can be used to sign into your Microsoft account.
After signing in you have access the following features:
- Save your custom preferences and settings, such as:
- Appearance (Themes, Fonts and Colors)
- Environment Aliases
- Keyboard shortcut
- Start-up
- Text Editor
- Automatic registration of the product is done during Sign In
New IDE features
The following are new IDE features in Visual Studio 2013.
Auto Brace Completion: This feature automatically adds a closing brace ( }) when an opening brace ({ ) is added.
Enhanced Scrollbar: It gives us an aerial view of the currently open window and makes navigation easier for larger files.
Move line up and down: Allows us to select blocks of code and move them up or down using the arrow keys. This makes code re-factoring easier.
Navigate 2: It provides a shortcut when there is a need to find code and even if the file name is not known.
Peek Definition: This feature allows us to peek into an object definition. It does so by opening a small window above the current window. There is no longer a need to open the file in which the code resides in, within a new window.
CodeLens: (This feature is only available in the Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate version). It displays the number of times a property or method is referred to by your code. This information can be helpful when changing existing code, since you will get to understand if the method is called from many places or from just a few places. In larger projects, especially ones where you are not familiar with the entire codebase, this can be a major time saver. The number of references is shown in a small font above each property or method in your class.
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CodeLens allows you to see the number of times a bit of code is referenced.
Clicking on the number of references will show you all of the methods that call it, making it easy to find and navigate to those sections of your code.