Release: Description of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 CTP 2

A CTP (preview) of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 has been released with lots of interesting new features and some fixes to. KB article here: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2927432

Of particular interest to me are this :

Debugger

  • Added a Visualizer for JSON data contained in String objects.
  • You can inspect instance values when you debug managed memory issues from dump files.
  • You can compare two .diagsession files that contain managed memory data with each other.
  • You can manually trigger Content prefetch in Windows Store applications.
  • Enabled Script debugging including the DOM Explorer and JavaScript console when debugging inside a WebView control.
  • Added extensibility point for Visual Studio plugins to modify the debugger’s symbol settings.
  • The values of individual objects can be inspected when you debug managed memory from a dump with heap.

and this:

Profiler

  • There is a new CPU Usage tool for examining which managed, native, and JavaScript functions are using the CPU. The CPU Usage tool replaces the previous CPU Sampling tool for Windows Store Apps and has fast time filtering, fast thread filtering, and an improved Just My Code experience.
  • The diagnostics hub now allows more than one tool to be run at the same time. Data from each tool is correlated on a common timeline for faster and easier performance analysis. Tools that can be combined are:
    • CPU Usage
    • Energy Consumption
    • HTML UI Responsiveness
    • XAML UI Responsiveness

oh, and this is pretty cool:

Windows Azure Tools

  • You can use Windows Azure Notification Hubs to send test notification messages to Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS, and Android devices and check the outcome in real-time.
  • When you log in to Visual Studio, you are presented the option to easily activate your Windows Azure MSDN Benefits (if you have not already done this).

oh, and..

Ok. just go read the KB article

Doug