Microsoft previews new Visual Studio, .NET

Floats fresh Azure SDK

BUILD Microsoft has given MSDN subscribers access to a preview version of Visual Studio 11 and a new version of .NET as well as developer version of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system.

The company announced the new developerware on Wednesday at its BUILD conference in Anaheim, California. The Visual Studio preview provides tools for building Windows 8 Metro applications in HTML5, JavaScript, C#, Visual Basic and C ++, and it includes new tools for code analysis and review as well as extension management. At the conference, Microsoft demoed a visual image editor that allowed coders to highlight a single pixel and instantly find the line of code responsible for it.

Microsoft has also released a preview version of .NET 4.5, with improved support for HTML5 and CSS3, and a preview of ASP.NET MVC 4, which Redmond says will handle web rendering better in a variety of browsers.

Separately, the company released a preview version of Team Foundation Services, a collaboration tool for coders that runs atop its Azure cloud. And it disgorged a new Azure SDK, version 1.5, with a beefed up emulator and remote desktop encryption and a Windows 8 toolkit. ®