Visual Studio 2012 Features

Develop for Windows 8

Visual Studio 2012 contains all the tools you need to develop killer apps for Windows 8, from templates, to designers, to testing, to debugging. To create Windows store apps using HTML/CSS and XAML, VS 2012 provides rich visual tools of Blend. Using these tools, you’ll find everything you need to develop a great app and submit it to the Windows Store.

Develop for the Web

Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 provide new advancement in ASP.NET including web optimization improvements (minification and bundling), new templates, HTML & CSS editor improvements, page inspector, and new publishing tools. Microsoft added new features to support JavaScript development including IntelliSense improvements, a new DOM explorer, and a JavaScript console

Develop for Windows Phone 8

Visual Studio 2012 provides support for developing Windows Phone 8 applications (both with a Express SKU as well as a freely downloadable plug-in for VS Pro and above). Some new features to look forward to include native C++ support, the ability to target both Windows Phone 7.x and Windows Phone 8 applications, multi-chassis support, and enterprise publishing.

Develop for Windows Azure

Visual Studio provides the best possible tools to develop your cloud services. In Visual Studio 2012, you notice cloud tooling improvements including support for distributed caching, new publishing options, new templates, and a lower install footprint. Using Team Foundation Service with Windows Azure, you can now achieve continuous integration and continuous deployment of your software.

Develop Business Applications

Visual Studio 2012 contains a variety of tools for developing business applications. SharePoint developers find new designers for list and content types, new templates for site columns and Silverlight web pages, as well as new options for deploying SharePoint sites. ALM features like performance profiling, unit testing, and IntelliTrace are now available for SharePoint development. Client-side development has been improved as well, with support for JavaScript debugging and IntelliSense.

LightSwitch is a powerful tool available for building business applications for the Desktop and the Cloud. Starting in Visual Studio 2012, LightSwitch is available as part of the Visual Studio Professional, Premium and Ultimate installations. LightSwitch includes a variety of improvements in Visual Studio 2012, such as a new theme, the ability to access data from any OData source as well as create OData services, Active Directory integration, and new business types.

Develop Games and other 3D Applications

Visual Studio 2012 includes graphics tools to help game developers become more productive, making it easier to build innovative games. From debugging DirectX graphics, to designing and coding DirectX shaders (HLSL), to inspecting and manipulating graphics assets (images and models), Visual Studio 2012 provides all the functionality you need to build graphically rich 2D/3D applications.

Take advantages of the latest language advancements

If you’re developing in C# or Visual Basic, you can take advantage of the language new features in Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 for asynchronous programming. Using the new async and await keywords, you can write asynchronous code that looks a lot like the synchronous version:

The C++ support in Visual Studio 2012 includes the full C++ 11 standard library as well as new language features: stateless lambdas, SCARY iterators, range-based for loops, and scoped enumerations support. Visual C++ 11 also adds seamless access to Windows Runtime components through C++/CX as well as C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP), which enables hardware acceleration for the execution of your data-parallel C++ code.

Performance, Reliability, and Compatibility Improvements

In addition to adding new features, Microsoft also invested heavily to improve the core capabilities of the product. For example, they’ve invested in performance and made significant improvements in areas such as the toolbox, typing and editing, debugging, and solution loading time. You will also notice the improvements in backward compatibility of Visual Studio 2012, which enabled you to continue collaborating on projects with teammates using Visual Studio 2010 SP1.

New IDE Productivity Features

The Visual Studio 2012 user interface includes an updated look and feel, which is consistent with the latest Microsoft products, and designed to focus your attention on the code. The overall environment has been streamlined, including simplified toolbars, a lightweight Find dialog, and less tab clutter by previewing files rather than opening them during debugging. Using Quick Launch, you can now search the IDE for any menu or command.

Improve your code quality with enhanced testing tools

Visual Studio 2012 includes a verity of testing tools.

Microsoft Test Manager 2012 has been enhanced to embrace exploratory testing (sometimes called agile testing), which allows you to explore the product in any way you want while keeping relevant steps and data that can be used to directly file bugs and feedback.

Lab Management has also been greatly simplified in this release with the consolidation of agents and the introduction of standard environments, which allow you to benefit from build-deploy-test workflows without the dependency on Hyper-V or SCVMM.

With Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft provides the ability to include additional adapters to support 3rd party unit testing frameworks such as xUnit.net, NUnit, and others. The new Test Explorer will showcase all of the tests across your solution regardless of which testing framework they were written for. Visual Studio 2012 will continue to provide support for traditional unit tests written using the classic Visual Studio Unit Testing Framework, and adds support for writing tests in C++ as well.

Reduce cycle times using tools for agile practices

Visual Studio 2012 contains a variety of tools to create transparency between team members, reduce waste, and accelerate the flow of the project. As you set out to start the project, PowerPoint storyboarding is a useful way to communicate the requirements of the software. When you get further along, the Microsoft Feedback Client can be used to gather feedback on the working bits from external stakeholders. Team Foundation Server 2012 provides a rich toolset for planning out your sprints, managing the backlog, and tracking progress.