The Visual Studio team takes great effort to ensure that our developer community is engaged and informed through various social networks, including channels on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. and as part of the process we gain insights into what you enjoy through your retweets, Facebook likes and shares, and other public opinions of our features and content.

Your participation and feedback is essential, as it lets us see what stories you care about. To share our own understanding of your interests, I post a daily “Top 10 Most Active Stories” article over on my blog at lyalin.com.

This month we’ve decided to take it one step further and go beyond just the daily data. I’ve reviewed a full month of activity for February 2015 and am posting here the top eleven most active blog posts that were trending. I hope you find this list useful and interesting; and of course we welcome your feedback.

Top Trending Blogs for February 2015

.NET CoreCLR is now Open Source. Furthering the .NET open source story, our .NET team blogs that CoreCLR is now Open Source, where they announce the availability of CoreCLR on GitHub. This post also includes a Channel9 chat with the .NET Core team where they discuss CoreCLR and CoreCLR repo, and provides a Console App walkthrough that developers can follow to build .NET console apps.

Scott Hanselman Analyzes .NET CoreCLR repo on GitHub using Power BI. Scott Hanselman covers .NET Core open source in his blog post The .NET CoreCLR is now open source, so I ran the GitHub repo through Azure Power BI , where he shares some interesting data. He shows how anyone can use Microsoft Power BI to pull in a GitHub repo, perform BI analytics, and gain insights into several aspects of a project such as who contributes how much to a project, issues found and closed, and others.

.NET Open Source Update. Immo Landwerth from the .NET team blogs on .NET Core Open Source Update, where he shares his view on just how great of an experience Open Source projects have been for him and the team. He talks about why we have open sourced .NET Core, and all the collaborative goodness you can use with Code and API reviews.

Scott Guthrie Introduces ASP.NET 5. A cloud-optimized, lean, and cross-platform open source web framework “ASP.NET 5” was made available in Feb 2015. Scott Guthrie blogs on Introducing ASP.NET 5, where he goes into the details of each change to ASP.NET. He provides screenshots and code snippets to share the various architectural improvements we have made with this release for example to provide a streamlined development experience we make use of dynamic compilation so you no longer have to compile your application every time you make a change. You simply (1) edit the code, (2) save your changes, (3) refresh the browser, (4) see your changes appear automatically.

Understanding .NET 2015. As part of a blog series focused on line of business applications, Beth Massi posted Understanding .NET 2015 in which she walks readers through a high-level overview of recent .NET innovations and the continued voyage into open source. A lot has happened since we released .NET 2015 at the Connect(); event, and this blog post will get you caught up.

Free Azure ebook on Fundamentals. The MS Press blog posted on a recently released free ebook: Microsoft Azure Essentials - Fundamentals of Azure. This book covers the fundamentals of Microsoft Azure and shares walkthroughs and examples to help you get started right away. It also discusses common tools useful when creating or managing Azure-based solutions, so it’s a great asset to check out.

Free O’Reilly report on Data Science in the cloud. The Microsoft Machine Learning blog posts on a free O'Reilly report on Data Science in the Cloud which shows how developers can use cloud-based tools with existing techniques like R to design Machine Learning models. The report uses practical data science examples, with relevant data sets and R scripts available on GitHub to make it easy to consume.

AngularJS in Visual Studio. The Visual Studio team blogs on Using AngularJS in Visual Studio. In this post they talk about how an extension to Visual Studio built by John Bledsoe (in collaboration with Jordan Matthiesen) helps with existing issues for developers working with AngularJS. This post also shares code snippets and details on the various features you can use to make your life easier.

Babylon.js 2.0. David Catuhe blogs on What’s new in Babylon.js v2.0. He showcases some amazing audio visual demos, special effects, and performance improvements in this release. For those that don’t know what Bablyon.js is, it’s a 3D engine based on WebGL and JavaScript, which gives developers some interesting opportunities to build 3D renderings or games that work with many modern browsers, certainly worth checking out.

Scott Hanselman on how JavaScript has won. Scott Hanselman blogs on JavaScript Has Won: Run Flash with Mozilla Shumway and Develop Silverlight in JS with Fayde. It’s an interesting post that highlights how JavaScript can be used to run Flash and Silverlight apps without Flash and Silverlight. Don’t take my word for it! Check out the post for the how and why of it.

Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 & Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP. Last but definitely not least, many of you were excited to see our blog post on the release of Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 and Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP release. In this blog post, John Montgomery covers highlights from both of these releases with additional links to posts, articles and docs that talk about each topic in details. Check out this post and download the bits to get started testing the newest release.

Feedback

I hope you enjoy this list. I will bring you a new one each month, so stay tuned and please don’t hesitate to send me feedback using Twitter or by commenting below.

Thank you for reading.

Dmitry Lyalin, Sr. Product Manager for Visual Studio (@lyalindotcom) Dmitry has been at Microsoft for over 6 years, working first in Microsoft Consulting and Premier Support out of NYC before joining the Visual Studio Team and moving to Redmond, WA. In his spare time he loves to tinker with code, create apps, and is an avid PC gamer.