Corina Oliver VS Product Manager Microsoft New Zealand
Visual Studio 2012 was developed with two major considerations, first how you use the technology and second what market trends are impacting you. The key trends in the market include the proliferation of mobile devices, the importance of collaboration with social experiences and cloud services. The advancements we made in Visual Studio 2012 will help you take advantage of the market trends impacting both developers and users. To improve the development experience we studied how developers interact with their IDE in order increase productivity. Improvements include simplified common tasks, a more intuitive IDE and reduced toolbar options so you can focus on the task at hand. The complete list of Visual Studio 2012 RC features is available on MSDN. There’s also this post which summarises the updates we’ve made in Visual Studio 2012 RC since the beta. These updates are primarily final touches on existing features, responses to beta customer feedback, and improvements to performance. Don’t miss the video, it’s an interesting and easy way to quickly see some of these updates in action. If you haven’t already, take the first step, get the Visual Studio 2012 release preview. Ensure you have Visual Studio with MSDN now to get Visual 2012 when it ships and avoid the price increases coming soon. Talk to your licensing partner for more information or call 0800 800 004, and choose option 3. Your test projects are compatible across VS 2012 and VS 2010 SP1 so you can easily transport across platforms. Find out more at What's New for Application Lifecycle Management Testing. There are several enhancements in the native and managed languages for developers to be more productive: C# and VB developers can learn more about a caller with caller attributes and make their synchronous code asynchronous; F# has type providers for generating types based on structured data stored in services and databases; and C++ supports the new standard library and several language features for C++ 11. We’ve spent some time touching on Visual Studio 2012 enhancements for developing apps on Microsoft platforms. However, those are not the only areas of improvement. We have also invested a lot in how to make development teams work together more effectively. In fact, Gartner recently issued its 2012 Magic Quadrant report for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). Gartner, one of the world’s top IT research and advising companies, positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant in the ALM space. We’re very excited to share this report, and for the industry recognition of our ALM tools! Check out the full Gartner report to find out more. It’s important to note that the 2012 Magic Quadrant report is based on an evaluation of Visual Studio 2010. We believe Microsoft’s position as a leader will continue to grow in Visual Studio 2012, where we’re enabling stronger collaboration and reducing waste at each stage of the product delivery. You can find more information on Visual Studio 2012’s features for continuous value delivery in an earlier MSDN blog post. Finally, check out our new ALM page with further product details at microsoft.com/alm.
