What’s New in Update 2 of Visual Studio 2012

April 4, 2013, Microsoft officially released Update 2 of Visual Studio 2012. It includes several new features and bug fixes in Update 1 which was released in November, 2012. Let's check out the new features and their contributions in software development market in terms of Better Application Life Cycle and Business Application Development.

Better Application Lifecycle – Update 2 has been released with better agile development and quality enablement capability.

1. Agile development has been made flexible and easy with the ability to tag, filter and share work items and customize Kanban boards

2. Quality Enablement to drive quality through Test Case Management with an ability to administer, execute and review test cases along with the following benefits

• Better Windows Store app Unit Testing support for Windows Phone 8 apps and  asynchronous code
• UI testing for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7, extended cross-browser support
• Facility to view and edit test cases in a test plan from TFS Web Access in a way that needs no installation on the system being tested and works non-Windows platforms
• Better support for web and load testing for SharePoint applications

Business Application Development – This includes a line of business development, Windows store development and developer experience features

1. Line of business development is focused around

• Creating cross-browser, HTML-based mobile & web apps using LightSwitch that provides the right fit and finish to get your application running quickly
• Publish business apps to a SharePoint2013 app catalog
• Support for Sketchflow, WPF and Silverlight for better designing and coding of desktop applications
• PhoneTools to enable unit testing as well as build and deploy workflows of Windows Phone

2. Developer Experience contains a host of improvements in the IDE that help provide better and productive developer experience such as

• Improved code map debugger integration that gives a visual representation of codes to identify issues quickly
• Improved HTML Visual Profiler to diagnose UI issues while developing Windows store apps
• Integrated Windows App Certification Kit to test app for submitting in the Windows Store

Besides the above enhancements, Update 2 of Visual Studio also includes ASP.NET and Web Tools. Thus a separate download is not required. Over and above these enhancements, one can see huge improvements since the bugs in the previous iteration have been fixed.

It is said that Update 2 is a cumulative release that envelops all the features of Update 1 allowing one to directly install Update 2 without installing Update 1.

Cygnet Infotech is excited to explore the Update 2 features and looks forward to make a difference in the development environment with Update 2 of Visual Studio 2012.

[Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2797912]