Microsoft have just held their second Connect(); virtual event with quite a few product announcements. If you didn’t get up in the middle of the night to watch it live, you can see all the videos from the event on Channel 9. Here’s my personal highlights:

Visual Studio Code open sourced and extensible

VS Code has now reached ‘beta’, which includes support for extensions. VS Code is now being developed in a public repo on GitHub.

ASP.NET 5 RC1

The rewrite of ASP.NET build to run on .NET Core is getting closer to final release. Some nice new tooling additions (Bower support), and early support for “.NET Platform Standard” as a way of indicating binary compatibility between packages.

Entity Framework 7 RC1

The rewrite of Entity Framework that runs on .NET Core (as well as full .NET Framework etc). Consider using it only if you don’t need features that it doesn’t have (kind of obvious advice really!)

Glimpse v2 Beta1

The re-architected version of the ASP.NET diagnostics dashboard that (for the moment) runs only on ASP.NET 5. If you’re (like most people) still using earlier versions of ASP.NET then stick with Glimpse v1 for now.

Visual Studio Dev Essentials

A one-stop shop to get free access to training, tooling and access to services.

Visual Studio 2015 Update 1

Due out on November 30th (so no link yet)

Windows Server 2016

Pretty sure this wasn’t a Connect() announcement but is just as interesting. Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 is now available, which includes support for Hyper-V Containers (a more isolated container technology than the lighter-weight Windows Server Containers that were introduced in preview 3).