JavaScript is an important technology for development on many different platforms, including web, mobile app, and server programming. In Visual Studio 2013 we already support IntelliSense, Go to Definition, colorization, and formatting of JavaScript source, along with several other features. We’ve carried these forward into Visual Studio 2015 and we’ve improved the experience for JavaScript developers by focusing on three key areas:

1. Improving the development experience when using popular JavaScript libraries
2. Adding support for new JavaScript ECMAScript 2015 (also known as ES2015 and formerly ES6) language and web browser APIs
3. Increasing your productivity in complex JavaScript code bases

As anyone in the .NET community who hasn't been living under a rock will know, there's a lot of exciting things happening with .NET at the moment with the announcement of the open source, cross platform, .NET Core. However, partly due to the very open nature of its evolution, there's been a whole host of names associated with its development - vNext, ASP.NET 5, ASP.NET Core, .NET generations etc.

In this post I'm going to try and clarify some of the naming and terminology surrounding the evolution of the .NET framework. I'll discuss some of the challenges the latest iteration is attempting to deal with and how the latest developments aim to address these.

This is really for those that have seen some of the big announcements but aren't sure about the intricacies of this new framework and how it relates to the existing ecosystem, which was my situation before I really started digging into it all properly!

Hopefully by the end of this article you'll have a clearer grasp of the latest in .NET! 

this article goes through almost all of the changes of the last 3 years (and some from earlier) in JavaScript / ECMAScript and TypeScript. 

Jint is a Javascript interpreter for .NET which can run on any modern .NET platform as it supports .NET Standard 2.0 and .NET 4.6.1 targets (and up). Because Jint neither generates any .NET bytecode nor uses the DLR it runs relatively small scripts really fast. 

JavaScript is a dynamically typed language which comes with great power of expression, but it also comes with almost no help from the compiler. For this reason we feel very strongly that any code written in JavaScript needs to come with a strong set of tests. We have built many features into Angular which make testing your Angular applications easy. With Angular, there is no excuse for not testing. 

In this video Anders Hejlsberg spends some time discussing TypeScript. He starts with the reasons behind creating TypeScript (the so called elevator speech) and then moves on to some of the features coming in the next release. He mentions a number of features but spends the time discussing the null (and corresponding undefined) types and how TypeScript 2 makes handling them much easier. 

During the last Build conference, Microsoft has announced the next version of Visual Studio with C# 7.3 support. This is yet another minor language update with some quite interesting features. The main change was related to generics, starting from C# 7.3 there 3 more constraints: unmanaged, System.Enum and System.Delegate. 

Basic Things

After working on the initial stages of several largish projects, I accumulated a list of things that share the following three properties:

• they are irrelevant while the project is small,
• they are a productivity multiplier when the project is large,
• they are much harder to introduce down the line.

We are aware of an issue where some customers are unable to run Windows Forms apps built against 6.0.2. This appears as a result of Windows Desktop servicing ref packs in 6.0.2. 

There are two supported choices of runtime for building server-side applications with .NET: .NET Framework and .NET Core. Both share a lot of the same .NET platform components and you can share code across the two. However, there are fundamental differences between the two and your choice will depend on what you want to accomplish. This article provides guidance on when to use each.