Visual Studio 2013 is New versions of Visual Studio usually coincide with updates to the .NET Framework and one of our biggest releases yet. It comes purpose-built to help you thrive in an environment in which ideas are at a premium and speed is of the essence.

With Visual Studio 2013, even the little improvements can make a big difference in your work. Keep up your rhythm going with automatic bracket completion and keyboard shortcuts for moving lines and blocks of code.

Visual Studio 2013 has been out in preview since Microsoft’s BUILD conference last month. One simple but useful feature that has been added? Whenever you type in an opening parentheses (whether it’s curly or a regular bracket), its matching counterpart is automatically added.

As the Visual Studio blog points out, this option already existed in the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools add-on, but is now part of the core product. Called ‘Auto Brace Completion’, it is language sensitive, and covers more than parentheses; in C++, for instance, it adds semi-colons for class types.

Hit the blog post for details of some of the other auto-complete features built into Visual Studio 2013, including a handy 'Peek Definition' feature for viewing definitions without leaving your code. Right now that’s a view-only feature, but Microsoft says it is working on adding edit options for the final release.