The color purple historically has been associated with royalty, so perhaps it is no surprise that Microsoft's purple-themed launch of Visual Studio 2012 Wednesday had the feel of a king's welcome. Microsoft's flagship developer environment was formally launched at Seattle's Bell Harbor International Conference Center in front of a gathering of several hundred developers and corporate partners. The event featured presentations by Microsoft's Soma Somasegar, Jason Zander, Brian Harry, and other members of the Visual Studio Team.
Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 were released to MSDN Subscribers on August 15, so this formal launch not only included a discussion of what VS2012 provides, but what the next steps for the VS2012 product space will be.
Somasegar's opening keynote highlighted several areas during his time on stage as spoke about VS2012's role in modern application development. To Somasegar, modern applications typically align with two major trends in the IT industry. The first is the “consumerization” of IT through the popularity of mobile devices and the growing need to provide a rapid response to customer needs. The second trend is the business agility required to support cloud environments and the processing of big data. Somasegar noted that over the next 5 years the world will generate as much new information as their currently exists today-- representing a doubling in humanity's knowledge in just 5 years.
To solve the problems that these trends uncover, Somasegar presented two key points about VS2012: it's ability to develop modern applications and managing the complete application lifecyle of continuous feedback in build-measure-learn process. Somasegar claims developer's participating in Microsoft's Technology Adoption Program have seen “12 percent improvement in time to market” by using VS2012 in their development cycle.
So where will the Visual Studio product go next? Somasegar announced that to fulfill Microsoft's promise of a more timely update schedule, a Community Technology Preview for Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 will be released before the end of September with the final code shipping prior to year-end. This update is expected to focus on the areas of additional support for agile development teams, continuous quality, and SharePoint and Windows development. (As InfoQ covered yesterday, two new versions of Visual Studio Express 2012 were also announced and released at this Launch Event.)
A 2012 edition of the Productivity Power Tools is scheduled for download in October. The 2012 edition of Team Foundation Server Power Tools is available now. Both provide enhancements to their respective product's features and ease-of-use.
