S. Somasegar is the corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. Learn more about Somasegar.
Today is the formal launch event for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5, a state-of-the-art development solution for building modern applications that span connected devices and continuous services, from the client to the cloud.
This morning’s launch keynote covers how Visual Studio 2012 takes you into the next era of software development. I opened the discussion with a look at trends in modern app development, followed by Jason Zander diving deeper into building apps, and Brian Harry touring through managing app lifecycle, all using Visual Studio 2012. This content is available live and for subsequent on-demand viewing from http://visualstudiolaunch.com.
In addition, the Visual Studio development team has put together over 60 videos to help you learn about the new Visual Studio 2012 capabilities in more detail, and all of these will be available for watching starting this afternoon. These videos provide a great point of reference across a wide variety of features and capabilities.
Modern Tools for Modern Apps
I’ve been looking forward to today for quite some time. We have a huge line-up of platform releases from Microsoft this year, from Windows 8 to Windows Phone 8 to Windows Server 2012 to Windows Azure to SQL Server to Office 365, all of them enabling you to create or modernize really compelling apps. And Visual Studio 2012 is at the center of this. With our developer tools, we strive to give developers targeting these platforms a streamlined experience for creating apps that excite and exceed the needs of customers, whether with consumer-focused or business-focused apps.
We know the demands on the apps you build and on how you deliver them are constantly evolving with industry trends. With the consumerization of IT, users expect new levels of app richness and interaction, desiring the same experiences for their business apps that they obtain in their consumer apps. Business stakeholders also demand much more agility for IT innovation. The apps themselves reflect this with more and more aspects of user-centricity, social integration, and data-centricity. And as your customers evolve, so too do your apps, requiring you to continuously improve and incorporate innovations faster than ever before, with continuous feedback, continuous quality, and continuous delivery.
Visual Studio 2012 is all about enabling you to build and manage these consumer-focused and business-focused apps. It provides best-in-class tools that propel developers to build new apps or evolve existing ones, and it enables individuals and teams to deliver continuous value, with agility and on their own terms. In conjunction, .NET 4.5 provides expansive capabilities for developers working on all forms of apps and services, from client to mobile to web to cloud, while at the same time enabling fast time to market.
Announcements
Of course, Visual Studio is also about being a platform that enables other developer tools to build upon and integrate with it. In that light, I’m thrilled to announce that today more than 70 Visual Studio partners are sim-shipping over 100 products for Visual Studio 2012. These solutions range from developer extensions and control libraries to extensions of the modern application lifecycle support in Visual Studio. Thank you to all these partners who are extending Visual Studio and customizing it for your needs.
Visual Studio Update: We’re also not standing still with this release, but rather are committed to continuously delivering value to you as part of regular updates to Visual Studio. Our first “VS Update” will better support agile teams, enable continuous quality, elevate SharePoint development with application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, and expand Visual Studio 2012 Windows development capabilities. It will be available as a community technology preview (CTP) later this month and in final release later this calendar year.
Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop: Back in June, I announced we would expand our line-up of Express products. Today, we’re releasing Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop, bringing the newest desktop development capabilities in Visual Studio 2012 to Express users, too. You can read more about this release on the Visual Studio team blog and download the release from here.
F# Tools for Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web: In addition, today we’re also releasing F# Tools for Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web, so that developers using F# can more easily take their apps to the cloud using Express. You can find out more about this release on the F# team blog and download the tools from here.
Thank You
We are committed to maintaining Visual Studio as the best tooling experience for Microsoft platforms and for enabling modern app development, to helping your team to embrace this new era of team development, and to enabling you to have access to the tools you need faster than ever before. We look forward to continuing to evolve Visual Studio to meet your evolving needs.
Thank you again for joining us on this exciting day, and enjoy.
Namaste!
Since this is being released by the end of the year, and Windows XP support is reported to be coming this fall, I assume this is how the Windows XP support will be delivered, but that isn't mentioned in that post. Also, since you've previously reported that these updates will include compiler updates, is there a list of which of the missing C++11 pieces will be included in this release? I would assume that variadic templates would be one of the big ones, since that was mostly implemented a year ago but was pulled from the product because it wasn't quite ready yet.
BOOO Soma!!! We (online) want the hardware too!! WTH! Give us a discount or something so we can build a ton of apps for Windows 8! Makes no sense to me and most as bad as the stunt pulled by MS Exec. at PDC 2009.
When Roslyn will be released ?
Has any pricing been released for upgrading from VS 2010?
Thanks Soma, it was really great presentation and great day :-) well done VS team!
@GregM: Our current thinking is to use the VS Update mechanism for delivering XP support, but I don't have an exact timeframe to share. I also don't have any additional info at present on C++11 language features.
@Tristan: We've not announced any ship dates or ship vehicles for Roslyn.
@Mike: Pricing information is available on the Microsoft Store at www.microsoftstore.com/.../categoryID.50804600 . Note that the price of Visual Studio Professional was lowered, and it was moved to a single SKU approach where there is no separate upgrade SKU.
Is this still a blog, or is it just a one-way announcement channel?
Your previous posts in this blog have received hundreds of comments about the ridiculous GUI. How about at the very least acknowledging them? Or better, writing an apology about how you have destroyed our favorite IDE? Or even better, fixing these problems in the upcoming service pack?
Wow!! the VS Express 2012 for Windows Desktop seems really a good release. I will try to download it to-morrow ( it is nearly midnight for me ). I have appeciated to have the 3 main languages (VC#,VB and VC++) in the same application.After the download and some tests, i hope that i will be able to tell you : you have done a tremendous work ( my most sincere wish )
Has the team learned any lessons from the VS2012 release?
Wouldn't it have been better to get feedback from your customers before dropping XP support? That way you could have avoided all the anguish and effort of having to add support back in.
Wouldn't it have been better to speak to your customers about restricting the Express versions to Metro only development before making the decision? That way you could have avoided the uproar which led to the decision having to be retracted.
Wouldn't it have been better to ask your customers *before* wasting countless resources making unwanted changes to the UI? The ALL CAPS MENUS are almost universally disliked. It's terrible developer relations to ignore the wishes of practically your entire customer base. But worse still, instead of listening and resolving the issue, to blog about how backward we all are for opposing change, is just rubbing salt in the wound.
When you've got unprecedented numbers of people voting against the icon and metro UI changes (on UserVoice) and 94% of your customers begging for the UI changes to be made optional (see Connect), most companies would listen:
connect.microsoft.com/.../make-proposed-monochromatic-ide-changes-optional-in-vs11
Why is Microsoft no longer working with its developer base? Why are have you stopped listening?
Thanks Microsoft. Really we are waiting for the New Release......
Will the update fix the user interface?
How could you present this user interface with a straight face? Please share your tricks.
Microsoft Allways Rocks Soma.
Waiting for the New Release....
Thank you,
Regards,
Srigopal
So when does SP1 come out? The initial version is buggy as hell. Crashes, weird behavior, features broken. I came up with a list of about 6 things the first hour I used it. Did you guys test at all? It sure doesn't seem like it.
We really need a complete VS2010 theme which includes the original ICONS, colors, borders, spacing, scroll bars, title menu and respect for the Windows selected theme such as Aero.
Theme Editor: visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/366ad100-0003-4c9a-81a8-337d4e7ace05
Proper Case the File Menu: blogs.msdn.com/.../turn-off-the-uppercase-menu-in-visual-studio-2012.aspx
Again, we need the original VS2010 ICONS.
ICONS, ICONS, ICONS.
Tom