To Develop for Windows 8

Visual Studio 2012 contains all the tools you need to develop apps for Windows 8, from templates, to designs, to testing, to debugging. Blend now comes with the Visual Studio installation providing visual tools for creating Windows store apps using HTML/CSS and XAML. Using these tools, you’ll find everything you need to develop a great app and submit it to the Windows Store.

Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 provide the latest advances in ASP.NET including web optimization improvements (minification and bundling), new templates, HTML & CSS editor improvements, page inspector, and new publishing tools.

Visual Studio 2012 will provide support for developing Windows Phone 8 applications (both with an Express SKU as well as a freely downloadable plug-in for VS Pro and above). This will come online in the future, once Windows Phone 8 and the developer SDK become available. Some new features to look forward to include native C++ support, the ability to target both Windows Phone 7.x and Windows Phone 8 applications, multi-chassis support and enterprise publishing.

Visual Studio provides tools to develop cloud services. In Visual Studio 2012, you’ll notice cloud tooling improvements including support for distributed caching, new publishing options, new templates, and a lower installation footprint. Using Team Foundation Service with Windows Azure, you can now achieve continuous integration and continuous deployment of your software.

Visual Studio 2012 contains a variety of tools for developing business applications. SharePoint developers will find new designers for list and content types, new templates for site columns and Silverlight web pages as well as new options for deploying SharePoint sites. ALM features like performance profiling, unit testing, and IntelliTrace are now available for SharePoint development. Client-side development has been improved as well, with support for JavaScript debugging and IntelliSense.

Visual Studio 2012 includes graphics tools to help game developers become more productive and making it easier to build innovative games. From debugging DirectX graphics, to designing and coding DirectX shaders (HLSL), to inspecting and manipulating graphics assets (images and models), Visual Studio 2012 provides functionality to build graphically rich 2D/3D applications.

Developers using C# or Visual Basic can take advantage of the new language features in Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 for asynchronous programming. Using the new async and await keywords, you can write asynchronous code that looks a lot like the synchronous version. The toolset also supports C++, JavaScript, F# and more.

In addition to adding new features, Microsoft has also invested heavily to improve the core capabilities of the product. For example, Microsoft invested in performance and made significant improvements in areas such as the toolbox, typing and editing, debugging and loading time.

The Visual Studio 2012 user interface includes an updated look and feel, which is consistent with the latest Microsoft products and designed to focus the developer’s attention on the code. The overall environment has been streamlined with simplified toolbars, a lightweight ‘Find’ dialog, and less tab clutter by previewing files rather than opening them during debugging. Using Quick Launch, you can now search the IDE for any menu or command.

Visual Studio 2012 includes a wealth of testing tools, including Microsoft Test Manager 2012, which has been enhanced to embrace exploratory testing (sometimes called agile testing). This allows you to explore the product in any way you want while keeping relevant steps and data that can be used to directly file bug reports and feedback.

Visual Studio 2012 contains a variety of tools to create transparency between team members, reduce waste, and accelerate the flow of the project. As developers start a project, PowerPoint storyboarding is a useful way to communicate the requirements of the software. When you get further along, the Microsoft Feedback Client can be used to gather comments on the working bits from external stakeholders.

With each release of its application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, Microsoft has integrated additional roles to improve collaboration across the team and decrease cycle time. With this release, Microsoft is including operations, which are increasingly important for today’s cloud-based services apps. Many developers are already using System Center to monitor their applications in production. With this release, Microsoft has introduced a new management pack that will allow critical production issues detected by System Center 2012 SP1 to be immediately assigned to the development team with high quality diagnostic information via TFS and Visual Studio.