Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 Release Candidate has many nice features

This is a 'go-live' update which is immediately production worthy although there could be some remnant bugs. Upgrading 2RC to Update 2 RTM is supported.

Download from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42307

Version:2013
Date Published:3/28/2014
File name: VSU2\VS2013.2 RC.exe
File size: 2.0 MB


















System Requirements:
OS
Windows 7 Sp1, Windows 8, windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows Server 2012

Additional requirements for Windows Phone development

    For Windows Phone 8.0 development:

•         Windows 8.0 (x64) Professional edition or higher

•         For the Windows Phone emulators, a processor that supports Client Hyper-V and Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)

    For Windows Phone 8.1 development:

•         Windows 8.1 (x86) or higher

•         For the Windows Phone emulators, Windows 8.1 (x64) Professional edition or higher, and a processor that supports Client Hyper-V and Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)

Update 2 RC includes support for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Update with many new features.

Platform unification across device types (PCs, Tablets, Phones) with common Windows Runtime. allows you to use Visual Studio Express to build apps for Windows and Windows Phone.

Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 working off the same Windows Runtime allows developers to share a large amount of code. In Visual Studio you can now have shared projects (C++,C# and JavaScript) making it possible to share code between Windows and w
Windows Phone.

More details on Somasegar's blog on MSDN here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/04/02/visual-studio-2013-update-2-rc-universal-projects-for-windows-and-windows-phone.aspx