Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2013

Chapter 18Introduction to Software Development

What's in this chapter?

• Learning about application lifecycle management features of most interest to developers in Visual Studio 2013
• Learning how My Work surfaces the most important items
• Managing interruptions using suspend and resume
• Seeking peer feedback on code using new code review capabilities

Visual Studio originally came into popularity in the 1990s by providing individual developers with the tools they needed to build great software. Most applications in that timeframe were created by individuals or relatively small teams working at a common location. However, over the course of many years, organizations developed increasingly larger and more complex code bases. The code is typically edited by a number of developers from all over the world, and teams must embrace rapidly changing requirements in order to keep up with the pace of business opportunities.

Simply having the tools at your disposal to create applications as an individual developer is no longer enough. You need tools to analyze large code bases, and to identify hot spots that might be causing you problems. You need tools that will provide you with the confidence that the application will still work after making your changes and will be more efficient, and the quality of the code will improve as your team matures. This is where Visual Studio 2013 comes in.

Visual Studio 2013 is also very useful for new “green field” development, on the occasion that you are ...