Microsoft is rolling out a second tech preview of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 on February 25, one with support for its new TypeScript language and tooling built in. Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 Community Technology Preview (CTP) 2 includes the near-final release candidate of TypeScript 1.0 “in the box.” TypeScript, a three-plus year-old Microsoft project, is all about creating a typed “superset” of the JavaScript scripting language for large-scale projects.
About a year and a half ago, Microsoft unveiled its TypeScript language to help programmers write large programs in JavaScript. Starting today, with the arrival of the first release candidate of TypeScript 1.0 and the latest update to Visual Studio 2013, it’s becoming a fully supported language in Microsoft’s IDE. That’s a strong commitment by Microsoft to TypeScript and brings it to the same level of built-in support as C# and Visual Basic. Until now, developers had to install a Visual Studio extension to enable support for the language. That wasn’t exactly a hardship, but the built-in support shows the importance Microsoft is giving this language.