Visual Studio 2012/TFS 2012 RC Released

The Visual Studio 2102 (formerly Visual Studio "11") Release Candidate (RC) and Team Foundation Server 2012 RC has been released by Microsoft.  The downloads are available now on the MSDN Subscribers Download site and I would expect the downloads to be available on the usual non-subscriber sites soon.

Check out this post from Brian Harry for a quick run down on some of the details.

Here are some other useful links from the above post:

• Visual Studio Product website
• Eclipse update site for the latest Team Explorer Everywhere preview or the download page
• Overall summary of changes since the Beta
• Jason’s blog post on the RC release
• For filing bugs: Visual Studio and TFS, LightSwitch, or Blend Connect sites
• For asking questions: Visual Studio and TFS or Windows forums

I’ll cover more of the details once I’ve had a chance to install the bits.

Visual Studio 11 UI Changes Coming…

When Visual Studio 11 Beta was released a few months back there were some drastic changes to the overall user interface (UI) within Visual Studio.  Namely, the UI was pretty much devoid of all color (short of various shades of gray).  Needless to say there was a tremendous amount of feedback provided to Microsoft pleading for a little color in their beloved IDE (as well as fewer ALL CAPS VERBIAGE).

Well, as it turns out, Microsoft has listened to the feedback and have posted some screenshots of the upcoming Visual Studio Release Candidate (RC) release which shows that some color has been added back into the UI.

Here are a few of the screenshots:

There is now less text with ALL CAPS VERBIAGE (although the main menu items are still in ALL CAPS):

The Visual Studio status bar now utilizes color to indicate various states (e.g. Ready, Development, Building, and Debug modes):

You can get all the details on the Visual Studio Blog, here.  I am personally looking forward to the RC release as I have liked what I’ve seen so far.