We are excited to announce the availability of the CTP of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, as it bring forwards a number of improvements for the XAML developer. The following are some of the key improvements you will find in this release:
WPF, Silverlight and SketchFlow support in Blend
Blend for Visual Studio now support WPF, Silverlight and SketchFlow projects in the same version of Blend (support for these was previously available only as a standalone Preview release of Blend). With this CTP release, Blend now supports developing Windows Store, Windows Phone, WPF and Silverlight apps without needing to have multiple versions of Blend on the same machine. The table below highlights the various platforms that are now supported in Blend for Visual Studio 2012:
Target platform | Versions supported | Specific Requirements |
| Windows Store XAML and HTML | Windows 8 | Windows 8 |
| Windows Phone | Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 7.5 | Windows Phone 8 SDK |
| WPF | 3.5, 4.0, 4.5 | |
| Silverlight | 4, 5 | |
| SketchFlow | WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 4 | Visual Studio 2012 Premium or higher |
Illustrator and Photoshop import support for Windows Store XAML apps
Blend now allows you to import Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop files into Windows Store XAML apps, using the same workflows that you have been familiar with in WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone. In addition, we have also enabled copying and pasting graphics from Illustrator directly into your XAML design surface.
Performance and Reliability
We have been actively working on improving the performance and reliability of using the XAML design surfaces in Visual Studio and Blend, as well as the XAML editor in VS. While our work is not yet complete, we have addressed a significant amount of feedback that we received in this release – particularly in areas where the XAML designer would take a long time to load for large projects. The following is a quick sampling of areas where you might see improvements in this release.
Scenario | Visual Studio 2012 | Visual Studio 2012 | % Improved |
| Opening XAML file in a WPF project with a common 3rd party WPF control library set | 9.9 | 4.5 | 54.4 % |
| Drag and drop a WPF control from the toolbox for a 3rd party WPF control library set | 16 | 3.2 | 80 % |
| Opening XAML file for a large WPF solution containing more than 80 projects | 71.9 | 6.9 | 90.5 % |
| Opening a XAML file from the default Windows Store XAML Grid App with a large number of assembly references unused from XAML | 35.4 | 4.9 | 86.1 % |
In addition to this, we also fixed approximately 30% of all issues that were submitted by you via Microsoft Connect. We continue to make progress on addressing more issues as fast as we can.
As usual, we look forward to any feedback you might have and ways we can improve your XAML Development experience – please keep it coming!