Today, the Visual Studio team announced the release of CTP2 of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 . Our team added a few useful features and did some bug fixing in this update to improve the web development experience. We will have future blogs to talk about some of the features in detail.
New SASS project item and editor
We added LESS in VS2013 RTM, and we now have a SASS project item and editor. SASS editor features are comparable to LESS editor, include colorization, variable and Mixins IntelliSense, comment/uncomment, quick info, formatting, syntax validation, outlining, goto definition, color picker, tools option setting etc.
New JSON project item and editor
We have added a JSON project item and editor to Visual Studio. Current JSON editor features include colorization, syntax validation, brace completion, outlining, tools option setting and more.
Create remote Azure resources option when creating a new Web project
We added a Windows Azure “Create remote resources” checkbox on the new web application dialog. By choosing it, you will be able to integrate the experience of creating a new web application, setting up the Windows Azure publishing site for testing, and creating publishing profile in a few simple steps.
MVC/SPA Template changes
We integrated Microsoft.AspNet.Identity 2.0-alpha1 into the new project templates. You can upgrade it to Microsoft.AspNet.Identity 2.0-beta1 to use two factor authentication.
For the SPA template, we removed the complicated AJAX based authentication, it now uses the simpler authentication method used in the MVC template.
LESS editor improvements
We added features including nested media queries, named parameter support, support for selector interpolation, support for semicolons as parameter separators, goto definition for @import, goto definition of variables and mixins.
Knockout IntelliSense upgrade
We added a non-standard KnockOut syntax for VS intelliSense, “ko-vs-editor viewModel:” syntax. It can be used to bind to multiple view models on a page using comments in the form: