What is New in Visual Studio 2012 RC

Microsoft has released its latest version of Visual Studio 2012 RC; the evaluation copy can be freely downloaded from the Microsoft site.

Visual Studio 2012 RC was previously known as Visual Studio 11. Visual Studio 2012 has great features compared to Visual Studio 2010; the look and feel has been improved drastically. The Visual Studio icon is changed from   to  .

Let's start with the new functionalities introduced in Visual Studio 2012 RC.

Recent Project List

Though this was available in earlier versions of Visual Studio, the option to remove a project from the list is now not available; you can remove unwanted projects from the "Recent" list by selecting the "Remove From List" option. (Right-click on the project you want to remove from the list then select "Remove From List".)

You can even see the latest Visual Studio GUI in the following screen shot:



Visual Studio Dark Theme

I have seen so many developers that don't like the default Visual Studio GUI color and they prefer to code using a dark background. Most of them go to Tools-> Options and change the default color and fonts.

But now you can do this by just changing the Visual Experience. Select Tools -> Options then click on "General" from the "Environment" section. You have the option to select "Dark" or "Light". This is really cool stuff. You can even download themes online.





Visual Studio Installation Engine Improvement

The Visual Studio 2012 installation has become very user-friendly compared to previous versions of Visual Studio. You can save almost 25% of installation time and save about 2.5 GB of space. There is significant improvement in the installation engine.

Other Features

Metro Style Application Development

This is the greatest feature and only available for the Window 8 operating system. To develop a Metro style application, you need to download and install the Windows 8 Release Preview Evaluation copy which is freely available on the Microsoft site. Once you install the Window 8 Release Preview, install Visual Studio 2012 RC.

Select File -> New -> Project which will open the "New Project" window. Select Visual C# or Visual Basic from the Template (my favorite is Visual C#) and go to "Windows Metro style".

Here you have the options to select the kind of Metro style application you want to develop.

(Note: Metro style applications are only available for .Net Framework 4.0 and .Net Framework 4.5.)