Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 is RTW... (and it's a "Wow" Update)

Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server Blog - Visual Studio 2012 – Update 2 RTM!

Visual Studio Updates are a mechanism we are using to provide ongoing value throughout the year to our Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server customers. These updates will provide features to support the latest software trends in the market, and also offer an easy way to deploy bug fixes.

Today we are excited to announce that Visual Studio Update 2 is now RTM!  - see Soma’s Blog Post with the official announcement.

Modern application lifecycle has been improved in Visual Studio Update 2 with significant improvements to both quality enablement and agile development.  Agile development has been made easier and more flexible with Work Item enhancements (tags, filtering, sharing), Kanban board customization and improved user interfaces.  Quality Enablement now supports a lightweight browser-based test management and execution to enable development teams to easily view/edit tests and your customers to run tests in a way that needs no installation on the system being tested and works non-Windows platforms; to decrease the time needed to continuously enable quality in software projects.

Business Application Development focuses on improving the line of business development and developer experience.  Highlights for the line of business developers include: HTML Client and SharePoint support for LightSwitch.  The developer experience improvements in the IDE include a new theme, Code Map debugger integration and performance in key areas areas including XAML design and Code Map rendering.

Download RTM Release

The release of Visual Studio Update 2 can be downloaded here:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=273878

Somasegar's blog - Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Now Available

"..

I’m excited to announce that today we’ve shipped Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2) and that it’s now available for download.  Just as with VS2012.1 (which is installed as part of VS2012.2 for those of you who don’t already have VS2012.1 installed), this release contains important fixes as well as a wealth of new functionality, addressing feedback we’ve received from the community and aligning with key software development trends in the market.  The new functionality primarily spans (though is not limited to) five areas of investment: agile planning, quality enablement, Windows Store development, line-of-business development, and the general developer experience.

Agile planning.

Quality Enablement.

Windows Store development.

Line-of-business development.

Development experience.

..."

Brian Harry's blog - VS/TFS 2012.2 (Update 2) released today

"...

Many of the features have been aired before in our CTP posts.  But there are a couple of things about the TFS update that I want to highlight.

TFS 2010 Build controller/agent compat – We’ve received feedback that simultaneously updating all TFS build machines along with the TFS server is not practical – particularly in large organization where there can be hundreds of build machines, many of which aren’t even known to the TFS administrators.  Because of this, in update 2, we have added support for TFS 2010 build controllers and agents – so you can update your TFS 2010 server without updating your build infrastructure and your builds will just keep working.  In general, we expect to continue this pattern from here forward – a new TFS server will support build machines from one major version back.  This adds the additional benefit this version that you can use the TFS 2010 build servers on Windows XP (in the event you need to do that) while the TFS 2012 build machines don’t support XP.  Based on the feedback we’ve gotten from our MVPs, this change is very popular and makes people’s lives much easier.

Preservation of TFS settings across updates – You may recall that when you applied TFS Update 1, you had to reconfigure many of the settings manually.  In Update 2, we put a great deal of effort into preserving settings across the upgrade.  While we didn’t get every one, we got the most common customizations and we plan to get most of the rest in Update 3.  In all the upgrade should be more seamless this time.

Upgrading TFS using SQL Always On – We added support to automatically handle upgrading TFS installs using the SQL Always On high availability configuration.  In Update 1, this was a manual process.

So I guess, what I’m trying to say is that, in addition to the long list of new features you’ll find in the blog post above (like new Agile project management capabilities, tons of testing tools improvements, Blend & Sketchflow support and more), we’ve worked really hard to make the upgrade as easy and seamless for you as we can.  Of course, if you hit any bumps, please let us know because we’ll want to fix them.

...

comment on Update 3…

We’ve already begun working on Update 3.  I’d like to set your expectations a bit on it now.  Update 1 & 2 were both fairly substantial updates with a fair number of new features.  My expectation is that Update 3 will be VERY modest.  In all likelihood, we will primarily focus on bug fixes, upgrade issues and small refinements to the experience.  At this point we are pretty consumed in working on our next major update to TFS and, as such, can’t manage to do 2 separate & significant things at the same time.

..."

This is a release I've been waiting for as it's supposed to fix a bug I've been running into where a Database Project in a Solution being loaded causes the WPF Designer to error with a Null Reference error for some third party components (bug report, WPF Designer NullReferenceException). Took me forever to isolate this... Who would have thought that a Database Project just being loaded would cause an issue with the WPF Designer? I was sure my system was hosed or I was doing something stupid... sigh.

Anyway... This is also a huge release in the number of pretty cool features included, both in VS and TFS. Love to see the LOB get some love... :)