Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 RTM will be available on October 18

Right now Release Candidate (RC) 2013 is available which came out in September. Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 with many new features will be launched November 13.

Things you find in this version:

Innovative new features to boost productivity:

• Improvements to UI - more than 400 modified icons, ramped up color usage, redesigned Start page and other hard to summarize subtle changes.
• Greater productivity with features such as automatic bracket completion; move code blocks with keyboard short cuts; and in-line navigation.
• Two modes of scroll bar usage, bar mode and map mode. You can home-in on the exact code location and navigate to it using these modes.

• The GoTo definition command has a added feature called Peek Definition. A line of code is something you or perhaps another developer added to the program and now you can backtrack and see all the historical details of when and who all dealt with the code. This is achieved by the new feature - CodeLens. CodeLens gathers your project META data and Team Foundation Server 2013 to provide this forensics.
• The Connected IDE experience is introduced making start up very fast. Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 will automatically synchronize settings (keyboard shortcuts, themes, fonts, etc.) across the devices using Connected IDE Experience.

Support Windows 8.1 applications across all devices and platforms

Support for windows 8.1 store development including:

• Tools 
• controls and templates
• Test support for XAML
• UI Responsiveness Analyzer
• Energy Consumption profiler for HTML and XAML Apps
• Memory profiling tools for HTML Apps
• Improved integration with Windows Store

Content layout enhancements to,

• Blend for both XAML and HTML apps providing precision layout
• Enhancements to coding in XAML apps with improved intellisense which is now available for databinding,template binding and resources. 
• Improvements to connectivity using Windows Azure Mobile Services.

Web Development enhancements

• The One ASP.NET vision unifies your web project experience in Visual Studio 2013 provides the ability to easily create hybrid applications that include improved versions of ASP.NET WebForms, MVC or Web API, all in a single project.
• Browser link enhances interactive development with mutlitple, diverse open modern browsers, so that switching back and forth between source and web browsers is eliminated for enhanced productivity.

Create Modern Apps for office 365

• Create Apps that extend the Office 365 to help interact with business processes,artifacts, etc.
• Leverage the Office 365 in the cloud to integrate with business related IT operations

Visual studio 2013 supports TypeScript

"TypeScript is a programming language with support for classes, modules, and interfaces that compiles down to JavaScript, which runs on any browser, in Node.js, or in any other ES3-compatible environment." 

Debugging and optimization improvements

Expanded Application Lifecycle Management Capabilities

* In order to use many of these features Team Foundation Server will be needed.

Begin your journey here by downloading Visual Studio 2013:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/2013-downloads

This post is excerpted from this Microsoft web page:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/2013-preview