The developer dashboard was a great new feature when SP2010 was released, and now with SP2013 it has been further improved, with the key changes being:

• The Dashboard now appears in a separate window – it isn’t rendered out at the bottom of the page you are diagnosing any more.
• Cumulative page requests are shown, instead of just the last request.  This certainly helps in SP2013 given the use of Minimal Download Strategy (MDS).
• The execution Plan of SharePoint stored procedures can now be viewed.
• The dashbaord is implemented as separate WCF service named diagnosticsdata.svc
• ULS Logs can be viewed through the browser (rather than opening the logs in ULSViewer or Wordpad) – but this should still be done from the server for security reasons
• The Dashboard can now be extended with Javascript 🙂

A new code sample has been released on MSDN that demonstrates how to return search results in an app for SharePoint.

“The SearchApp sample accepts a query using the keyword query language (KQL) syntax as an input. It subsequently makes a call to the search engine using the search Representational State Transfer (REST) service. The results are then displayed in a table, which is built dynamically using JQuery and JavaScript.”

The screen shot below shows search results displayed on the home page of the sample:

Figure 1. Home.aspx page in the app, displaying the search results

Go get it here and even more SharePoint 2013 sample code here.