Developer Tools Overview

Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 shipped in Apr. 2010. They include a major update to team development features, with enhancements for testing and application modeling. Visual Studio 2012 became available as a release candidate in May 2012. The new version will probably become generally available near the release of Windows 8, which is expected in Oct. 2012.

The Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate can be used with the Windows 8 Release Preview to implement Metro-style applications with templates and tools for the C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, and JavaScript programming languages. Other enhancements focus on improving application life-cycle management by helping development teams, IT operations personnel, and application users work together better to design, develop, and manage software. New user interfaces within Visual Studio, supported by Team Foundation Server 2012 (of which a release candidate is also available), simplify routine tasks for developers.

The .NET Framework 4.5 is included with the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate and adds improvements for developing asynchronous code that can speed application responsiveness, and enhancements for using HTML5 and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 3 with ASP.NET. Windows 8 brings a new set of system APIs called the Windows Runtime, or WinRT, which is separate from the .NET Framework and Win32 APIs that are used for current Windows development. Although WinRT supports development with a subset of the .NET Framework 4.5, it introduces uncertainty for the .NET Framework roadmap beyond version 4.5.