Hello everyone! Every month I share some top stories from the previous month. Here’s an overview of some top posts in May.

Top Trending Content for May 2015

.NET at Build 2015. On the .NET blog, Richard Lander shared 2 interesting posts. .NET Announcements at Build 2015 is an excellent one-stop shop for everything you need to know about the latest updates in .NET core, .NET Execution Environment (DNX), .NET languages, ASP.NET, Entity framework, and all of the improvements in Visual Studio for .NET. Targeting the .NET framework 4.6 RC has details about the latest version of the .NET Framework and the new APIs it exposes. This post builds up from how to target a .NET framework, to how .NET framework 4.6 can be targeted in VS 2013 as well as VS 2012.

Visual Studio Code Update 1. Visual Studio Code is a new, free, cross-platform code editor that was announced during Build 2015. Check out the VS Code product page to learn about all you can achieve using VS code. VS Code is expanding rapidly in its support for various languages and tools to make it easier for you to use. The first update for Visual Studio Code was released with over 300 improvements and bug fixes. Have you been thinking of using Visual Studio Code with Angular, TypeScript. Or have you wondered how you can use it to build Mobile Hybrid apps? Look no further! Chris Dias talks about using Angular with VS code, and also has a post to get you started with building Mobile Hybrid Apps with VS Code and Ionic, Jonathan Turner shares a quick walk-through for using TypeScript in Visual Studio Code,  and Sean McBreen shares information about VS Code and Docker. Keep an eye on the Visual Studio Code blog for more feature posts and upcoming updates.

Blend for Visual Studio 2015 RC. Visual Studio 2015 RC Blend got a major update with many new features and improvements. Kino Aguilar highlights some top features including: the new user interface tailored for XAML developers; Roslyn powered IntelliSense; and UI tools for XAML debugging. He also talks about how easy it is to navigate between designing in Blend vs. editing in Visual Studio using the new commands. Download Visual Studio 2015 RC to try the new Blend.

Bringing Clang to Windows. On the VC++ blog, Raman Sharma talks about how Clang is fast becoming the preferred C++ compiler for non-Windows platforms. To extend the various capabilities and benefits of using Clang, to the C++ developers building Windows apps, the team is working on an experimental implementation of Clang on Windows. Jim Radigan demonstrates this in his build talk on Compiling Objective-C. The Clang and LLVM community has provided packaged toolset builds for Windows that integrate very well with Visual Studio. This post talks about how we have built on top of this toolset to deliver additional capabilities like cross-platform development.

Introducing Visual Studio’s Network Tools. With the release of Visual Studio 2015 RC, a new network tool (part of the existing Performance and Diagnostics hub) was released. This tool helps you diagnose network related issues when building Windows apps across the Windows continuum from Windows Phone, to HoloLens, to Xbox. In his post introducing the VS network tool, Ruben Rios shows you how and where you’d use this tool, and details the different sections of this tool as well as the views of the network traffic it shows. He also shares how the default views have been built to maximize your productivity when using this tool.

7 cool features in Visual Studio Online. ALM rangers like Willy-P Schaub not only share their thoughts on the Visual Studio ALM Rangers blog, but also author e-books like Managing Agile Open-Source Software Projects with Visual Studio Online. Recently they published a post on the 7 cool features noticed in Visual Studio in the most recent update. This is a short and sweet post to get you up to speed on the top new features like the ability to fast track to your Kanban board or get straight to your code after creating a project. Visual indicators tell you which items on the board are managed by your or another team. The board itself can be easily customized, you can split columns into Doing and Done and easily specify Definition of Done for each column.

C# 7 Features. In this article, Mike James shares Mads Torgensen’s working list of features for C# 7; think of this as more of a wish list than a set of promises. Mike also provides some details on some of the features to give you a better idea of its capabilities, along with some good examples. Some items on the feature list are tuples, pattern matching, non-nullable references, using statements, and async/await. To give you a small view into what these features really mean, a tuple is a group of typed values that are gathered together for some temporary purpose, like a set of method parameters could be grouped into a tuple. Pattern matching allows for powerful conditionals based on the type of an expression. The features have been categorized into various buckets to facilitate discussion. Checkout the working list and Mike's blog post to see examples of these features in use. 

Building Mobile Apps with Ionic and Monaca. With Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova it is very easy to build an app targeting iOS, Android, and Windows. Kirupa Chinnathambi shares how the team took this a step further by collaborating with Ionic and Monaca to provide project templates within VS. These templates allow you to use Ionic or Onsen UI frameworks to build mobile apps right within Visual Studio.

JavaScript moves forward in Microsoft Edge. Brian Terlson from the Chakra team talks about the upcoming ECMAScript 6 (also known as ES2015) highlighting some key capabilities and the community excitement around it. He also talks about support for ES2015 features in Microsoft Edge and shows a compat table that compares various browsers’ compatibility against ES2015 features.

Code Analyzers: Using Roslyn to analyze your code. Channel 9 has a lot of useful content under shows, series, blogs, events, etc. The particular video of interest is on the DevRadio blog where Jerry Nixon talks to Srivatsn Narayanan to discuss how you can use Roslyn to analyze and troubleshoot errors. The video starts off with Srivatsn giving an overview to explain Code Analyzers and how they are useful. It then deep dives into use cases, where and how you can use code analyzers, which languages it applies to, etc.

To see what else I’ve shared so far, check out top news from February 2015, top news from March 2015, top news from April 2015.

Thanks you for reading!

Radhika Tadinada, Program Manager, Visual Studio  @RadhikaTadinada Radhika has been at Microsoft for almost 4 years. She first started off as a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Platform team where she helped build IDE features. She is currently with the Customer team and manages the Visual Studio blog.