Microsoft Corp. released Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 at the company's TechEd North America 2014 conference in Houston.
The new version comes with many new abilities, along with fixes for performance, bugs, customer feedback and reliability improvements, according to WinBeta.
The ability to build universal apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 is an important feature.
"We're excited to share that the final release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 is ready to download," Microsoft said in an official blog post. "If you are already using Visual Studio 2013 then you'll soon have a notification waiting for you in the notification hub to start the download and install Update 2 for Visual Studio 2013. If you haven't started using Visual Studio 2013, you can get all the new capabilities and fixes with a single install that includes Visual Studio 2013 RTM and all the features in Update 2."
Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 now supports Apache Cordova, which is also widely known as PhoneGap, Visual Studio Magazine reported. Cordova allows developers to build a single project with CSS, Javascript and HTML 5.
Developers are also able to target most mobile OSes such as Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Windows Store.
Microsoft extended Visual Studio Online, the company's offering for cloud-based application lifecycle management, by releasing new APIs and service hooks that provide integration points to third-party users, The Next Web reported. As a result, organizations can adopt Visual Studio Online more easily without getting rid of tools they currently use. The move also makes Microsoft's tool more specialized.
The company said the new version allows for more agile web development while providing the best of class performance and startup times. It is made effective especially for cloud and server workloads.
Microsoft also emphasized that ASP.NET developers are able to create applications with automatic built-in cloud support. Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 will be part of the .NET Foundation as an open source project and will run across different platforms, according to The Next Web.
S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president Developer Division, said the new version will not affect any current ASP.NET apps, Visual Studio Magazine reported.
"Everything you know today about ASP.NET will apply to ASP.NET vNext," he said. "You can use the existing libraries or the new versions for those libraries in .NET vNext and get immediate benefits."
