In addition to Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 being released to manufacturing, Microsoft has completed its tool suit - Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5.
On August 1st of 2012, Soma Somasegar, the corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, announced that they have completed Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5. For MSDN subscribers, the builds will be available for download on August 15th. Microsoft is also planning a launch event on September 12th.
Jason Zander, corporate vice president for Visual Studio, writes,
The engineering team is finished and is now preparing the build for our numerous distribution channels.
From Visual Studio Blog it is known that the source code for Visual Studio 2012, formerly known as Visual Studio 11, consists of about 50 million lines of code. And despite this fact new release contains lots of new features and improvements.
Regarding what’s new in Visual Studio 2012, most features have already been shown in RC reviews. Jason Zander has published a detailed exploration of what’s new in RC release in his blog. Sumit Kumar, a Program Manager on the Visual C++ team, wrote in his blog about the enhanced support for C++ in RC. And Visual C++ team wrote in their blog that the support of Windows XP targeting will be available after an update. Posts about “responsiveness improvement” and “dark theme” from the Visual Studio Blog are also worth a look at.
Soma Somasegar said in his blog post, “This has been an exciting road for all of us involved in these projects, and we’re glad to be able to deliver these to our customers.”
Launch event on September 12th will provide more information about all the new capabilities in VS 2012.