It was a huge day in New York today as I got to join Scott Guthrie and the team at the Connect() 2015 event as they announced a bunch of stuff, including, but not limited to:

Visual Studio Code is now Open Source and a new Beta that supports extensions is out now!

ASP.NET 5 RC1 is out with .NET Core and has a Go Live License. This means you can go into production with ASP.NET 5 on Windows or Linux and Microsoft will support you.

You can get ASP.NET at, wait for it, http://get.asp.net. Yes. This lively URL is a mini-site that will look at your OS and show you Linux, Mac, or Windows (try visiting it on a mobile phone for fun, too) and tell you how to get ASP.NET. If you insist, you can visit https://get.asp.net/OtherDownloads for a list of all the packages and combinations available. There is a .pkg for Mac and a .tar.gz and some instructions for Linux. In the future I hope/expect we'll have .NET in some popular OS package managers.

Node.js Tools 1.1 for Visual Studio was also released. A lot of folks don't realize how cool Node.js development is in Visual Studio. Node.js Tools for VS is free and open source AND works with the Visual Studio Community, which, ahem, is also free.

If you don't have Visual Studio, I'd recommend you grab Visual Studio Code which is a non-threatening size and runs on any OS, then if you're a command line person you can do this on Windows:

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "&{iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://dist.asp.net/dnvm/dnvminstall.ps1'))}"

or this on Linux/Mac.

curl -sSL https://dist.asp.net/dnvm/dnvminstall.sh | sh && source ~/.dnx/dnvm/dnvm.sh

And yes, we have have formal ways to get this and you can again, always go to https://get.asp.net and check our SSL cert. ;)

Connect 2015 Keynotes and Videos

You can watch everyone's talks here and my specific keynote here. My talk was complex and varied but also very personal as we built all the demos around my diabetes and blood sugar system. I also used the Nightscout Open Source CGM Project and gave them a shoutout as well. I use Nightscout to remote my continuous glucose meter's data to the cloud. That glucose data collector runs in an Azure Web Job that I've blogged about before.

We had so much fun making our "parade" of cool cloud demos. I get tired of doing demos around product catalogs and such, so we build a connected Health Clinic. We pulled data in from thousands of (simulated) Microsoft Bands, as well as my actual physical Band 2 that I wear every day. We combined my heart rate data with my actual live and historical glucose data and ran it through Azure Machine Learning to create a "Hanselman Stress Index" to get a sense of how stress and my schedule affects my heart rate and blood glucose. You should really watch the video to get the full effect.

We'll do some cleanup of the slides and code and try to get it all on GitHub soon(ish) so please be patient with us.

I also want to point out the documentation for ASP.NET 5 RC1 over at http://docs.asp.net. This documentation is hosted and built at ReadTheDocs using Python and Sphinx and managed as source in GitHub using reStructuredText.

Contributing to the docs is a great way for YOU to get involved in Open Source, especially if you are a FirstTimer! Check out this great video on how to contribute to the ASP.NET documentation. The community can contribute by:

The Mega List of Connect() 2015 Information

You want it all? OK, here you go, the list of everything announced at Connect() 2015:

What does it all mean?

It means that you can build basically whatever you want, however you want. You can use the editor you like, the OS you like, and the languages you like. VSCode on a Mac doing Node and deploying to Azure? Check. ASP.NET 5 with C# to Docker Containers in a bunch of VMs created in Azure and managed with Microsoft Operations Manager? Check. And on and on. Node.js on VS, C to Raspberry Pi's in C in VS, whatever you dig. It's a whole new world.

Sponsor: Big thanks to Octopus Deploy for sponsoring the feed this week! Check out their amazing product. I'm a fan.

Build servers are great at compiling code and running tests, but not so great at deployment. When you find yourself knee-deep in custom scripts trying to make your build server do something it wasn't meant to, give Octopus Deploy a try.