Microsoft has released the second community technology preview (CTP) for Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 and a release candidate for Team Foundation Server 2013. One of the biggest new features in the new update for the Visual Studio IDE is full support for the TypeScript language. The open source programming language compiles to JavaScript but aims to make it easier to write larger applications.
“JavaScript is tremendously popular these days and is sort of the only game in town when it comes to cross platform, but it also is a dynamically typed language that was never really intended for more than 100- or maybe 1000-line apps,” Microsoft Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg explained. “And now people are regularly writing 100,000- or 1 million line apps in JavaScript.” He added, “So the thought process behind TypeScript was what could we do to add those missing concepts to JavaScript and how could we do it in a major way that doesn’t compromise the true value of JavaScript ? namely that it runs in any browser on any OS on any platform. That really is what TypeScript is; it’s a superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. And the compiler is written in itself and therefore compiles to JavaScript and runs on any platform, even on your phone.”
