Though it has been available on MSDN for a few weeks now, today marks the official launch of Microsoft's flagship development environment, Visual Studio 2013.

In addition to supporting Microsoft's latest platforms—in particular, Windows 8.1—Visual Studio 2013 includes some pretty neat productivity features. Revision history and work item information appears inline within the code editor to show what has changed and why.

In the new release, the IDE also includes a bunch of new profiling capabilities for Windows Store apps. There's a profiler to measure application energy usage, user interface responsiveness, memory usage, and, of course, processor usage.

Alongside the new IDE, the company is also launching a quintet of new and updated services, collectively known as "Visual Studio Online."

Underpinning the entire set of online offerings is Team Foundation Service, the cloud-hosted version of the Team Foundation Server application lifecycle management suite. This provides both centralized version control using the Team Foundation version control system and distributed version control using git, along with work item tracking, planning, and management.

Building on this service is a software-build service to perform cloud-based building from within Visual Studio and on Visual Studio Online. Once built, the Elastic Load Test Service allows that software to be tested with tens of thousands of virtual users to see how it performs under load.

TFS, Hosted Build, and Elastic Load Test are all available in public preview from today. The remaining two services are more limited.

The first of these is Application Insights, which initially collects performance and usage data from .NET and Java applications on Windows Server and Windows Azure, as well as Web and Windows Phone 8 apps. With Application Insights, developers can see how their applications are being used and how they're performing, and they can then collect diagnostic information when there are problems.

The second is an IDE in the cloud codenamed Monaco. Monaco is still an early preview at the moment—hence only having a codename—that right now allows quick browser-based editing of Azure websites.

Visual Studio Online will be free for teams of up to five and will give users 60 minutes of build time and 15,000 load test user-minutes. MSDN subscribers will receive Visual Studio Online benefits as part of their subscriptions. For nonsubscribers who need to support larger teams, there are subscription options, and more minutes of building and load testing can be bought for $0.05 and $0.002, respectively.

Finally, Microsoft is also offering a fourth update to Visual Studio 2012 to fix bugs and enhance compatibility with Visual Studio 2013.