Microsoft announced on 15th Aug 2012, that Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 is RELEASED to web. You can download Visual Studio 2012 from the here. Visual Studio 2012 comes with lot of new features and new appearance. Although there are so many new things introduced in the latest version of Visual Studio and it is difficult to cover all the features in one post. So I will describe few features here.
Visual Studio 2012 comes in multiple versions: Ultimate, Premium, Professional, Test Professional, and Express.The first thing you notice after installing Visual Studio 2012, is the look and feel of Visual Studio 2012. The Visual Studio 2012 IDE is a primarily monochrome experience black, white, gray, and blue. Other colors appear only in the syntax highlighting of the code and in some minor features. icons are small, black and not inherently intuitive.
Technically framework 4.5 is not part of Visual Studio 2012. But this new release of Visual Studio 2012 accompanied the latest version of framework 4.5. Its a big change including improved support for parallelism and IPv6, support for zip compression, HTML 5, WebSockets, and WPF Ribbon bar support. Asp.Net web forms are updated and also new Asp.Net MVC 4 is introduced. Which contains lot of new handy features.
Visual Studio 2012 is using IIS Express as the default local web server. IIS Express is a lightweight, self-contained version of IIS. It has all of the core capabilities of the full-fledged IIS, but it doesn’t run as a service.
WinRT(Window Runtime) is a new programming model used by Windows 8 and Metero. It’s cross-platform application architecture on the Windows 8 operating system. Visual Studio 2012 supports WinRT development in C#, VB, C++ and JavaScript. Programs written using WinRT should run on both Intel and ARM processors.
Visual Studio 2012 improves its SQL Server integration with the new SQL Server Object Explorer, which is more like SQL Server Management Studio than the old Server Explorer. The new SQL Server Object Explorer shows column data types as well as primary and foreign keys.
In short Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 is a powerful tool provides developers a new experience, which enables them to be more productive than ever before. Or I must say that it turns ideas into applications fast.
Scott Hanselman, introduce a series of videos on Asp.Net 4.5, and the new features related to web application introduced in Visual Studio. I must say that you should view these videos.
- ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms Model Binding
- Visual Studio 2012 HTML Editing Features
- Visual Studio 2012 CSS Editor
- Visual Studio 2012 JavaScript Editor
- Visual Studio 2012 Page Inspector
- ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms Strong Typed Data Controls
- Visual Studio 2012 Web Publishing Improvements
- ASP.NET MVC 4
- ASP.NET Web API
- Bundling and Optimization
- SignalR and Web Sockets
- Async and Await
- OAuth in the Default ASP.NET 4.5 Templates