The release candidate of Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download, and Microsoft has announced the official release date. 

The release candidates of Team Foundation Server 2013 and .NET Framework 4.5.1 are also now available for download. The release date for the new version has been set as November 13, 2013.

The improvements to the new version include more support for C++ 11, a better XAML editor, a cloud business app that will let you use Office 365 elements as part of your application, and CodeLens, a code analysis feature that gives you information about your source code. Unfortunately, CodeLens is only included in Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate, so will be out of reach to most developers.

The C++ 11 enhancements adds support for the C++11, NSDMI and alias templates, but there are still more features not supported. Some will be added in a future community technical preview, others are still at the ‘planned’ phase as indicated in Microsoft’s Roadmap for C++ 11 support. This is an updated version taking into account reality at RTM. 

Click to open a bigger but still not very high quality version of the graphic.

The XAML Editor improvements are the addition of IntelliSense for Data Binding. According to S. Somasegar in a recent blog post, this works with a DataContext defined in the markup, or with a design-time DataContext for cases where the context is provided in code-behind. Support has also been added for Go To Definition for Resources, Bindings, Properties and XAML Elements.

The Cloud Business App Template will let you attach and consume data from multiple data sources, and work alongside Office 365 for collaboration and communication. The template provides an HTML based app UX that works across desktops and devices. A sample app created at Build showed using Office’s extended data types such as Person and Office document, and how you can use them in your apps to access information such as presence information, contact cards, uploading documents to a document library, and opening documents in Office Web Apps.

For many developers, the news that CodeLens is to be limited to VS2013 Ultimate is a real disappointment. Using it lets you see a pop-up box showing what changes have been made to a piece of code, who made those changes, references, bugs, work items, and code review requests.