Visual Studio 2012

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2012 is an integrated solution that enables individuals and development teams of any size to turn their ideas into exceptional, compelling applications. It enables all stakeholders involved in software delivery to take advantage of state-of-the-art tooling to create outstanding experiences that delight the end users of your consumer and business applications, with a simplified development solution that enables quality through all the tasks and roles involved in a software project.

With Visual Studio 2012, you enhance your team’s ability to implement state-of-the-art developer practices that are adapted to your team’s optimal rhythm. It provides workflows and tools that shorten delivery cycles, includes customers and operations in software construction, and eliminates waste. As a result, you reduce risks, solve problems faster, and continuously deliver value that exceeds customers’ expectations.

This Visual Studio 2012 Product Guide provides a comprehensive overview of scenarios and features regarding:

• The new integrated development environment (IDE).
• Windows® 8 development.
• Web development.
• Cloud development.
• SharePoint development.
• Application Life Cycle Management tools.

This guide also provides information about the benefits that Visual Studio 2012 offers to diverse stakeholders in software delivery projects, including testers and operations staff.

Visual Studio has been designed to ensure that developers can provide a continuous flow of value to the business. The interface has been revamped to remove significant clutter from the screen, while still providing fast access to frequently used features. Removing unnecessary distractions helps developers remain focused on the key development tasks.

The software development ecosystem is evolving, and Visual Studio supports not only developers but also many other people involved in the software development process. Now stakeholders become part of the process early on, and as requirements change, Visual Studio enables you to capture those changes and to rapidly update your application. Productivity enhancements help developers to work faster.

Visual Studio now builds applications more quickly and includes new and enhanced tools that make debugging easier. With the advent of new platforms and new distribution channels, new challenges and new opportunities arise. Applications often must be developed for many platforms, each with subtly different requirements. Visual Studio helps developers to create applications that span device boundaries. Project templates, debugging tools, and portable code libraries all help to make this process easier. Visual Studio even enables you to upload your application directly to the Windows Store.

Another significant change is the increase in applications that use and implement services to access data. From games with scoreboards to weather forecasts and traffic reports, many applications use services to provide up-to-date and relevant information. Applications can easily go viral and very literally be an overnight success. If this happens, you need to ensure that your services providing the data can cope with the sudden influx of requests.

Visual Studio supports developers by enabling them to create solutions that are highly scalable, supporting a range of models from durable full duplex synchronous services to high-throughput asynchronous services. Developing a scalable solution is only half the challenge: You must also provide a suitable environment to act as a host. With Visual Studio you can develop for a range of infrastructure choices. Whether you choose to target a physical server, a virtual server, or a private or public cloud, Visual Studio is your solution.

If you decide to use the Windows Azure™ public cloud offering, you can deploy directly from Visual Studio to the cloud. As your application matures, you can perform in-place updates, and when your application goes viral you can easily scale out your application. By enabling developers to focus on the code, involving stakeholders both within and outside the business, and by making deployment easy, Visual Studio helps to ensure that your software development team continuously delivers business value.

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