In the ever-evolving world of technology, the year 2023 witnessed remarkable advancements in developer tools and frameworks, shaping the way we build, deploy, and maintain software. This roundup explores features and releases that have defined the developer landscape over the past year.
Due to the vastness of the topics covered, it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss all changes and updates in detail. Therefore, only a brief summary along with link to official documentation has been provided. Head on to the links to learn more about the relevant changes and updates.
Contents
Development Tools and Frameworks
Visual Studio
AI-assisted development was the most sought-after feature introduced in Visual Studio.
Visual Studio had a series of releases (v17.5 through v17.8) in 2023.
Visual Studio 2022 – 17.5 Release Blog
Visual Studio 2022 – 17.6 Release Blog
Visual Studio 2022 – 17.7 Release Blog
Visual Studio 2022 – 17.8 Release Blog
Visual Studio Code
VS Code uses a monthly release cycle, the last release in 2023 was VS Code 1.85 released in November
Visual Studio for Mac (to be retired in 2024)
Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6.7 was released on 14 November 2023. Microsoft has announced its plans to retire Visual Studio for Mac. All support will end on 31 August 2024 and the product will no longer be supported. Microsoft recommends that we migrate to VS Code and C# Dev Kit extension to continue development of .NET applications for Mac.
.NET
.NET 8 was released on 14th Nov as an Long Term Support (LTS) release with a three year support lifecycle.
.NET Aspire is an opinionated, cloud ready stack for building observable, production ready, distributed applications.
C#
C# 12 was released in November 2023. New features include:
- Primary constructors – Introduced in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6 Preview 2.
- Collection expressions – Introduced in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.7 Preview 5.
- Inline arrays – Introduced in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.7 Preview 3.
- Optional parameters in lambda expressions – Introduced in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.5 Preview 2.
ref readonly
parameters – Introduced in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.8 Preview 2.- Alias any type – Introduced in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6 Preview 3.
- Experimental attribute – Introduced in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.7 Preview 3.
- Interceptors – Preview feature Introduced in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.7 Preview 3.
Eclipse
Eclipse, as usual, had four quarterly releases in 2023. Click the links to learn more what was added, changed or deprecated in each of these releases.
Java
Java SE 21 (LTS)was released on 19th September.
Python
Python 3.12 was released on 2nd October, followed by a minor release 3.12.1 on 8th December.
Node.js
Node.js 21.5 released on 19 December 2023
Go
Go has a six month release cycle
Go 1.20 release on 8 August 2023
Go 1.21 released on 1 Feb 2023
Rust
Rust has several frequent releases every year. The latest version, Rust 1.75.0, released on 28 December 2023.
Mobile Development
Android Studio
Android Studio Hedgehog (2023.1.1) was released on 30th November 2023.
Xamarin/MAUI
Xamarin.Android 13 was released on 10th October 2023 with support ending on 1st May 2024.
Xamarin.Forms 5.0 was released on 10th August 2023 with support ending on 1st May 2024.
Xamarin.iOS 16 (compatible with Xcode 15) was released on 10th October 2023 with support ending on 1st May 2024.
Xamarin End of life
Microsoft has officially announced that it would end support for Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin.iOS in 2024. Though not mentioned specifically, the natural progression path for Xamarin based apps is to migrate them to MAUI.
Flutter
Flutter 3.16 was released in November 2023.
Dart
Dart 3.2 was released on 15 November 2023.
iOS
XCode 15.1 was released on 11 December 2023.
Swift 5.9.2 was released on 11 December 2023.
Cloud
AWS
In November, Amazon launched S3 Express One Zone, a high-performance, single-Availability Zone storage class that delivers consistent single-digit millisecond data access for frequently accessed data and latency-sensitive applications.
Amazon Q is a new type of generative AI assistant specifically for work. It can be tailored to your business and is with security and privacy in mind.
Amazon Bedrock goes Generally Available (GA) in October. Bedrock enables you to build and scale generative AI applications with foundation models.
Amazon SageMaker acquires 5 new capabilities.
Aurora introduces preview of Limitless Database
RedShift extends SUPER data type column size support to 16 MB
ElastiCache Serverless is launched.
A list of all major and minor releases in the AWS world in 2023 can be found here.
Azure
Azure Storage Mover goes Generally Available (GA)
Microsoft Dev Box is now generally available
ASP.NET Core integration in Azure Functions goes GA
SDK type bindings in Azure Functions goes GA
Azure Data Explorer support for native ingestion from Amazon S3 goes GA
Azure Data Explorer supports multiple databases per data connection
A list of all Azure updates can be found here.
GCP
Log Analytics in Cloud Logging is now GA
Extending reality: Immersive Stream for XR is now Generally Available
Google Cloud brings generative AI to developers, businesses, and governments
Build new generative AI powered search & conversational experiences with Gen App Builder
Introducing Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus: New edition delivers up to 3x MySQL performance
BigQuery Studio is announced.
Memorystore for Redis Cluster is GA
GKE Enterprise, the next evolution of container platforms, is GA
A list of all GCP updates in 2023 can be found here.
AI/ML
Generative AI
2023 was the year of Generative AI. What makes Generative AI distinct from other AI technologies is that it found its fan base among normal non-technical users for their day-to-day tasks.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT with Voice is available for all users (21 November 2023)
GPT-4 was launched on 14 March 2023.
Plug-in support for GPT was introduced on 23 March 2023
You can learn about all changes to ChatGPT in the ChatGPT Release Notes
Google Bard
Google announced Bard, a LaMDA based conversational AI chatbot, on 6 Feb 2023; and provided early access to limited users in the US and UK on 21 March 2023.
Google Vertex AI
Google launched Vertex AI, an ML-based Cloud platform for building and launching search and chat apps quickly.
Gemini, Google’s most capable model, is now available on Vertex AI
Generative AI support on Vertex AI is now generally available
Bing Chat/Copilot
Microsoft integrated AI into its Bing search engine and released it as Bing Chat on 7 February 2023. Microsoft later renamed it to Copilot.
DevOps & Platform Engineering
Kubernetes
Following its usual release cycle, Kubernetes had three releases in 2023
Kubernetes 1.27 released on 11 April 2023
Kubernetes 1.28 released on 15 August 2023
Kubernetes 1.29 released on 13 Dec 2023
Docker
Docker Engine 24.0 was released on 16 May 2023 followed by several minor releases up to 24.0.7 on 17 October 2023
Docker Desktop had a multitude of releases in 2023 with the latest being 4.26.1 released on 14 December 2023.
Docker Compose V1 has been deprecated and V2 has been fully integrated into Docker Desktop.
Terraform
Terraform 1.6.6 is the latest stable version that was released on 13 December 2023.
Ansible
Ansible 2.16.2 was released on 11 December.
Database
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL 16.0 was released on 14 September, followed by the minor release 16.1 on 9 November which mostly consists of bug fixes from 16.0
SQL Server
SQL Server did not see any release in 2023. The last release of SQL Server was on 16 November 2022 (SQL Server 2022). There were a bunch of cumulative updates for various supported versions mainly focusing on bug fixes and security vulnerability fixes.
Redis
Redis 7.2 and the older 6.4 saw few releases in 2023
Wrapping up
I hope you found this article useful. The objective of writing this was to provide a quick summary of major releases pertaining to popular developer technology stacks that happened in 2023. This article neither aims to nor attempts to cover all technologies and frameworks. If this article is missing something that you think is worth mentioning, please leave a comment with the details and I’ll update the article. Happy reading. Don’t forget to share this article with your developer friends.