Urban Turtle at Microsoft Campus
This year again, Urban Turtle went to Seattle for the annual Microsoft Visual Studio Partner Program (VSIP) summit near Seattle. More specifically, we were on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. And let’s say it was quite a week for Microsoft and for us.
Visual Studio 2015: a good start for Microsoft
A couple weeks before the summit, Microsoft released the highly anticipated new version of Visual Studio 2015. The first results of that release are quite impressive! All Microsoft expectations about downloads and installations have been exceeded. I think we can confirm the interest we saw for Visual Studio 2015 in all publications.
Microsoft also announced good results for Visual Studio Online. The cloud solution seems to get more and more popularity. Especially since Microsoft has decided to become more “open source” oriented. They are very proud of their new implication in GitHub!
Visual Studio Online: create your own solution
It’s not a secret for anyone; Microsoft is going on the Cloud and they want to get there pretty quickly! During last year’s VSIP summit, Will Smythe, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, announced the arrival of a new VSO version and the possibility of creating new extensions for that cloud service.
One year later, VSO is becoming increasingly popular and the tendency will probably get stronger with all the new announcements. The main element that will surely increase the interest in VSO is the extensions store that Microsoft wants to create for the cloud service. The store will give you the opportunity to add a lot of extensions to your VSO solution. For the launch of the store, Microsoft will only propose Microsoft extensions, but the store will be open to third parties in 2016. A little clue for the Urban Turtle lovers among you, Urban Turtle will be available in that store in 2016!
The other interesting element with VSO is the fact that Microsoft now opens its API to all developers. So if you have an angle to enhance your VSO experience, you can now easily develop your idea and connect it to the cloud service. Pretty cool! You can really optimise your experience on VSO and enjoy all your ideas and other developers’ realisations.
What’s up for Urban Turtle?
After all these meetings and conferences, we are very excited about all this! We are already supporting TFS 2015 with our Urban Turtle 5 and we are still providing the best Agile experience integrated in TFS. We are also very excited about all the new stuff in VSO. We have a very nice playground in front of us and we will make sure to take advantage of these new opportunities. Lots of cool stuff to come!