Visual Studio

Update 2

Visual Studio Updates

Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 provides many new capabilities to support development on the latest platforms with modern lifecycle tools to make it easier for teams to deliver value continuously. Visual Studio Updates help ensure you always have the best solution for building modern applications and for managing the modern application lifecycle.

Visual Studio 2012 Update 2

Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (Visual Studio 2012.2) is the latest update for Visual Studio, providing new functionality and fixes. In addition, Update 2 is a cumulative release that also includes all of the benefits delivered in Update 1. As part of Visual Studio’s commitment to continuous delivery, this release has enhancements that span feature areas across all editions, with a special focus on the modern lifecycle capabilities introduced in Premium and Ultimate. The new functionality in Update 2 focuses on four key areas:

Agile planning

Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new set of capabilities to support agile teams—on their terms. Update 2 adds new capabilities for your team to customize and get more out of its agile tooling. You can now add customizable columns to your Kanban boards so that they more accurately reflect your organization’s structure. Work item tagging helps teams to manage their work items by adding tags to get more out of their data.

Quality enablement

Maintaining quality throughout the development cycle is one of the key focus areas for Visual Studio 2012. In Update 2, you can continue to drive quality wherever you are through web access for Test Case Management. You can author and execute test cases remotely, making it easier for all members of your team to participate in test case reviews. You can also profile your unit tests to create better code by tracking the end to end flow of your code, including the unit test itself.

Line-of-business (LOB) application development

With Update 2 we continue to invest in making it easier for you to develop LOB applications. You can quickly create SharePoint apps and HTML5 client apps using LightSwitch. Just design your app and let the LightSwitch templates provide the fit and finish so you can get your LOB applications running quickly. With the addition of WPF, Silverlight and SketchFlow to Blend for Visual Studio, now you have everything you need for designing and coding your desktop applications in Visual Studio.

Developer experience

When you spend a lot of time developing software, you want tools that will provide an enjoyable developer experience. Update 2 includes enhancements and updates to improve the developer experience for Visual Studio 2012. Code map debugger integration gives you a visual representation of your code while debugging so you can identify issues faster. You can also create great apps for Windows Store using profiling enhancements to find issues earlier that could impact your users.

KB2797912: Description of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2

Additional Updates

Additional downloads for Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (Visual Studio 2012.2) are also available for:

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (Visual Studio 2012.1) provides enhancements and fixes to address a variety of issues reported through Connect and Windows Error Reporting. In addition, Update 1 delivers a wealth of new functionality into Visual Studio 2012. Most of the new functionality appears in Ultimate and Premium, but there are some features for Professional and Express products, too. The new functionality in Update 1 primarily spans four key areas:

Windows development

For the release of Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012 added new templates, designers, and testing & debugging tools to support this new platform, including support for Windows Store apps with the Windows 8 Simulator. Update 1 adds support for mixed-mode (managed/native) debugging of Windows Store apps, and support for native ARM dump debugging. This update also includes code analysis support for Windows Phone 8 apps. But Update 1 isn’t just about new Windows platforms. It also enables you to target Windows XP with native C++ applications in Visual Studio 2012.

SharePoint development

With Update 1, we also invested in expanding our lifecycle tools for SharePoint 2010, especially for testing and quality assurance. You can now use unit tests and coded UI tests for simulating user interaction, including the Microsoft Fakes Framework to stub out SharePoint dependencies. Load testing support enables stress testing of SharePoint applications under simulated load and network conditions. In addition, you can now capture SharePoint logging information using IntelliTrace to provide a rich analysis experience for SharePoint applications.

Agile teams

Visual Studio 2012 brought a lot of new features to support the work of agile teams. Update 1 builds upon these advancements with significant usability improvements in Team Foundation Server’s web interface and a much improved source viewing and diffing experience. Update 1 also includes functionality for Team Foundation Server that first appeared in Team Foundation Service, such as Kanban support with a Kanban board and a cumulative flow diagram. In the IDE, Code Maps enable you to create and view dynamic visualizations of relevant code to understand and navigate its relationships faster.

Continuous quality

Enabling continuous quality is a key focus area of Update 1. Code coverage for automated tests is now available for manual testing, which enables you to analyze which areas of a code base are used during manual testing. Update 1 also supports cross-browser testing, with the ability to record web tests in Internet Explorer and then later replay them with most modern browsers. Using Test Explorer, you can group and run tests based on their traits (Test Category, Test Property, Priority, and Owner). You can also pause and resume manual test sessions in Microsoft Test Manager, and automatically create an image log of all actions performed during an exploratory testing session.

KB2797915: Description of Visual Studio 2012 Update 1