Hosting your first project in Visual Studio Online and Getting started with Visual Studio 2013 Communtiy edition

During last week’s Connect event, Microsoft surprised us with a lot announcements such as moving up more and more things to open source, plans to make ASP.NET cross-platform and a free edition of a Visual Studio named Visual Studio Community 2013. Unlike the express versions for all the flavours such as web, desktop we have till now, the Community edition is a full featured edition of Visual Studio with curbs on use for enterprise development. It supports features like extensions which was sorely missed in the express edition and is perfectly suitable for developers like me and small business houses. Till now we have to use different incarnation of express editions of Visual Studio if you are not using their paid tools, but in community edition we are able to develop application for Web, Windows, Phone, Cloud, iOS, etc.  If you interested then you can go here to read more on this and click here to go to the download page.

Another great free service from Microsoft is Visual Studio Online, which leverages the capabilities of Team Foundation Server and can be used as the repository for all your development projects. If comes with support for five users in the free tier, supports various editors such as Eclipse, Xcode and of course Visual Studio. Please go through this link to know more about the service.

In this post I am going to show how can we host and mange a project created in VS 2013 Community edition in Visual Studio Online right from the IDE itself.

Step 1

Create an account with Microsoft account at https://app.vssps.visualstudio.com and follow the steps mentioned in the screenshots.

Step 2 

Upon successful creation of the account you will be presented with the dashboard from where you will be to create a new project in the VS online. You also have the option to create the same from the control panel also, which can be accessed by clicking on the icon in the top right corner of the page.

Step 3

I am going to create the new one using the second option, by clicking on the Create a new Team project in the page.You need to give a name for the project, has the option to select either TFS or Git as the version control and also for selecting a process template with options for Scrum and agile are available.

Step 4

Once these steps are completed, you will be presented with the dashboard for your newly created project. Since I have selected my process template as Scrum, the dashboard contains info for my current sprint, burn down chart etc along with other quick links. For  more details about scrum, please refer the documentation available at <link here>.

That’s all we need in VS online to get started with the work from Visual Studio.

Step 5

Let’s power up VS 2013 Community and if you are opening it for the first time, you will asked to sign with your Microsoft account which will be then subsequently used to connect to the VS online account. If you don’t need to connect at this moment, you bypass the dialog and do it at some later time.  You can create a new project from File –> New Project and select the desired template and don’t forget to select the Add to Source Control in the dialog. 

Step 6

In this you need to select the source control system for the project and VS supports TFS and Git out of the box. In the earlier step we have selected TFS as the source control system while creating a new project in Visual Studio online, so we will proceeding with that option from this window.

Step 7

We can create the structure for the solution in this step as well as mapping using the advanced options.

Step 8

That’s all we need to get started coding using VS 2013 and Visual Studio Online. Given below is the screenshot of the solution explorer in VS with the newly created project.

In the coming post we will be exploring more of VS 2013 Community and Visual Studio Online portal. Till then happy coding.