VS2012.2 CTP Released ("Blue is back, baby...")

Brian Harry's blog - Announcing Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2)

Today we released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2).  It’s exciting to see the next update of VS working it’s way to completion.  There’s going to be a ton of cool new capabilities in Update 2.  Not all of them are available in this CTP but many are.  Below, I’ve described the significant improvement’s that you’ll find in this CTP and I’ve grouped them into 4 categories:

1. Agile Planning
2. Quality Enablement
3. Line of Business Development
4. Developer Experience

This CTP is NOT a “go-live” CTP.  It is for evaluation only.  We’re trying to learn from Update 1 and get feedback earlier in the cycle.  We will be having “go-live” pre-releases of Update 2 in order to facilitate that but not quite yet.

You can download the CTP here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=273878

..."

There's a good deal of goodness in this release, from features moving down the SKU stack...

Fakes & stubs in Premium – We have decided to include Fakes & Stubs in VS Premium (in addition to Ultimate) to allow unit tests to be more easily shared across the whole team.

Unit Testing love;

Some test process customization – Customize the list of possible test resolution and failure types.

Group unit tests by class – Another way to easily categorize/organize tests.

Playlists – Easily create arbitrary groups of unit tests, save them and run them.

Including Blend for VS;

Blend for VS 2012 – We’ve added back Blend for VS 2012, including support for WPF, Silverlight and Sketchflow.

To baking in the blue theme;

Visual Studio Blue Theme – We’ve incorporated the popular the VS “Blue” theme that we released on VSGallery into Update 2.

Lots for everyone in this release. But please note this is NOT a Go-Live release!