Today is the formal launch event for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5, a state-of-the-art development solution for building modern applications that span connected devices and continuous services, from the client to the cloud.
This morning’s launch keynote covers how Visual Studio 2012 takes you into the next era of software development. I opened the discussion with a look at trends in modern app development, followed by Jason Zander diving deeper into building apps, and Brian Harry touring through managing app lifecycle, all using Visual Studio 2012. This content is available live and for subsequent on-demand viewing from http://visualstudiolaunch.com.
In addition, the Visual Studio development team has put together over 60 videos to help you learn about the new Visual Studio 2012 capabilities in more detail, and all of these will be available for watching starting this afternoon. These videos provide a great point of reference across a wide variety of features and capabilities.
Modern Tools for Modern Apps
I’ve been looking forward to today for quite some time. We have a huge line-up of platform releases from Microsoft this year, from Windows 8 to Windows Phone 8 to Windows Server 2012 to Windows Azure to SQL Server to Office 365, all of them enabling you to create or modernize really compelling apps. And Visual Studio 2012 is at the center of this. With our developer tools, we strive to give developers targeting these platforms a streamlined experience for creating apps that excite and exceed the needs of customers, whether with consumer-focused or business-focused apps.
We know the demands on the apps you build and on how you deliver them are constantly evolving with industry trends. With the consumerization of IT, users expect new levels of app richness and interaction, desiring the same experiences for their business apps that they obtain in their consumer apps. Business stakeholders also demand much more agility for IT innovation. The apps themselves reflect this with more and more aspects of user-centricity, social integration, and data-centricity. And as your customers evolve, so too do your apps, requiring you to continuously improve and incorporate innovations faster than ever before, with continuous feedback, continuous quality, and continuous delivery.
Visual Studio 2012 is all about enabling you to build and manage these consumer-focused and business-focused apps. It provides best-in-class tools that propel developers to build new apps or evolve existing ones, and it enables individuals and teams to deliver continuous value, with agility and on their own terms. In conjunction, .NET 4.5 provides expansive capabilities for developers working on all forms of apps and services, from client to mobile to web to cloud, while at the same time enabling fast time to market.
Announcements
Of course, Visual Studio is also about being a platform that enables other developer tools to build upon and integrate with it. In that light, I’m thrilled to announce that today more than 70 Visual Studio partners are sim-shipping over 100 products for Visual Studio 2012. These solutions range from developer extensions and control libraries to extensions of the modern application lifecycle support in Visual Studio. Thank you to all these partners who are extending Visual Studio and customizing it for your needs.
Visual Studio Update: We’re also not standing still with this release, but rather are committed to continuously delivering value to you as part of regular updates to Visual Studio. Our first “VS Update” will better support agile teams, enable continuous quality, elevate SharePoint development with application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, and expand Visual Studio 2012 Windows development capabilities. It will be available as a community technology preview (CTP) later this month and in final release later this calendar year.
Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop: Back in June, I announced we would expand our line-up of Express products. Today, we’re releasing Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop, bringing the newest desktop development capabilities in Visual Studio 2012 to Express users, too. You can read more about this release on the Visual Studio team blog and download the release from here.
F# Tools for Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web: In addition, today we’re also releasing F# Tools for Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web, so that developers using F# can more easily take their apps to the cloud using Express. You can find out more about this release on the F# team blog and download the tools from here.
Thank You
We are committed to maintaining Visual Studio as the best tooling experience for Microsoft platforms and for enabling modern app development, to helping your team to embrace this new era of team development, and to enabling you to have access to the tools you need faster than ever before. We look forward to continuing to evolve Visual Studio to meet your evolving needs.
Thank you again for joining us on this exciting day, and enjoy.
Namaste!