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VS2013 Update 3 Continues Refinements

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Microsoft has released Update 3 for Visual Studio 2013 and the RTM designation means it is now safe to use in production environments.  The update can be downloaded from Microsoft in both web-based and standalone installers.  Alternatively it may also be installed from within VS2013 directly via the Notification menu.

Users of VS2013 Ultimate will see some existing features receive helpful improvements.  CodeLens will now work with any Git repository, enabling the display of commit information directly within the editor window.  CodeLens originally solely supported traditional TFS-based repositories, so this is a welcome addition.  Also new for VS2013 Ultimate users is a revised Code Maps tool that adds the ability to generate maps from DLLs, better zoom tools, and the use of color-coding to make relationships between entities easier to identify.

The Memory Usage Tool that debuted in VS2013 only supported Windows Store and Windows Phone appls.  With Update 3, this tool has been expanded to support WPF and Win32 applications.  The JSON editor included with Update 2 has been improved to support formatting and brace matching.

The infamous menu capitalization issue that arose with VS2012 resulted in the addition of a registry key that allows user to configure this according to their personal preference.  With Update 3, the direct editing of the registry setting is not needed for VS2013 as this option is configurable in via Tools | Options | Environment | General menu item.

Deploying applications has been simplified by the removal of the requirement to use a Microsoft Deployment Agent on each target machine.  Update 3 adds support for deployments to both on-premises and Windows Azure hosted targets.  Windows PowerShell, Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration, and Chef are supported.

For full details on these and all features included with this third update, refer to the official Microsoft announcement and release notes.

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