Microsoft has made several important announcements regarding Visual Studio 2013, starting by setting the official release date for the product as November 13, 2013. In preparation, the Release Candidates of VS2013, Team Foundation Server 2013, and .NET Framework 4.5.1 are available for download now.
For developers working on Windows Store apps for Windows 8.1, it is important to note that VS2013RC will only support this capability on machines running Windows 8.1 RTM, which is now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers ahead of its public release on October 18. VS2013RC can be installed Windows 7 SP1 or greater for desktops and Windows 2008 R2 SP1 or greater for servers. As Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows is used for app-store specific development, it will only install on Windows 8.1 RTM.
These RC releases give developers an opportunity to find out how the production release of VS2013 should perform, and experiment with several new features. The first is the addition of IntelliSense for Data Binding in the XAML Editor. The XAML Editor is also getting some of the features found in the eslewhere in the VS2013 IDE including “Go To Definition”, which provides the ability to navigate to the source code definition for Resources, Bindings, Properties, and XAML Elements.
The next addition is the Cloud Business App Template which allows developers to utilize apps that are built on Office 365 and Windows Azure. The RC also ships with additional elements of C++11 support including "aliases, = default, and non-static data member intializers".
TypeScript version 0.9.1.1 formally joins the official Visual Studio release package, which means a separate download is no longer required. VS2013 Ultimate has the new feature CodeLens, which has been further improved in the RC. Now when CodeLens indicates who wrote a particular code segment, it will include that developer's Lync status.
VS2013RC, like its predecessor VS2013 Preview, will require you to log in with your Microsoft account after 14 days. According to Microsoft this is being done so that they can load-test their servers prior to full release. Microsoft states that upon full release VS2013 will not require a login.