VSTest is a very extensible unit test execution framework.  The base engine, discovers tests and runs them.  It can parallelize across cores, provides process isolation and can integrate with Visual Studio.  It has extensibility for different test frameworks, code coverage, test impact analysis, data collection, test result reporting and much more. 

However, it is clear that Microsoft’s future direction is in the Core space . Yes, the last update to the full .NET framework did include improvements for ASP.NET and WebForms, but clearly the future innovation and hard work will be in the new core frameworks like .NET core, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework core, and whatever other cores come along in the future. 

The Joel Test is great for software development shops and for programmers that are interested in quickly evaluating a company’s software development environment, but what about a Joel Test for actual programmers? 

There's no extra IL code for the var keyword: the resulting IL should be identical for non-anonymous types.  

CSS for internationalisation 

.NET Core, the reinvention of the Microsoft .NET Framework as an open source, cross-platform development choice, is a key focus of the upcoming features planned for the Visual Studio IDE.

In conjunction with .NET Standard -- a spec detailing what .NET APIs should be available on all .NET implementations -- .NET Core retains compatibility with .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono while letting developers use Windows, macOS or Linux machines to code for mobile, cloud and embedded/IoT projects.

While still primarily driven by Microsoft dev teams, .NET Core is hosted on a GitHub repository and is supported by the .NET Foundation, an independent organization created by Microsoft three years ago to improve its open source development and collaboration.

Peeking at the Visual Studio Roadmap (updated last week) reveals .NET Core figures prominently in upcoming functionality for the IDE, both in the near-term and long: