Today was 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. The event was streamed live from http://visualstudiolaunch.com, S.Somasegar corporate vice president of the Developer Division opened the key note, Jason Zander dived deeper into how to leverage Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 to build modern application. Brian Harry all the awesome features in Visual Studio 2012 to improve the application lifecycle management.

I. Summary of the announcements made today

1. Visual Studio Updates coming this fall –  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. A comprehensive list of what will be on offer can be found here.

2. Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop – Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop brings the newest desktop development capabilities in Visual Studio 2012 to Express users, too. You would be excited to know that the express SKU will support Integration with TFS among some of the other cool features I would like to mention Unit Testing, Unit Testing, Code Analysis, dependency management with NuGet a full list and download links can be found here.

3. F# tools for Visual Studio Express 2012 for web –  This F# Tools release adds in F# 3.0 components, such as the F# 3.0 compiler, F# Interactive, IDE support, and new F# features such as type providers and query expressions to your Visual Studio 2012 express for web. More details and download links can be found here.

4. Visual Studio TFS 2012 Power Tools – The TFS 2012 Power tools brings the goodness of Best Practice Analyzer, Process Template Editor, Storyboard Shapes, Team Explorer enhancements, TFPT command line, TFS Server Backups, etc via to your TFS 2012 installation. It can be downloaded right away from here.

II. Road shows

There will be many more community road shows this month packaged with hours of demos and discussions.

The Visual Studio UK Team has just announced that there will be four UK launch events, face to face session including a product group speaker and partner sessions:

• Edinburgh, 1st October
• Manchester, 3rd October
• London, 4th October
• Reading, 5th October

III. Get Started

Download Visual Studio 2012 and the additional supporting software's from here. 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 here.

IV. What’s Next

A lot more exciting stuff lined up…

Windows 8
Anticipated release: Oct. 26 (UPDATED 9/12)

Windows Server 2012
Released (UPDATED 9/4)

System Center 2012
Released (UPDATED 9/11)

SQL Server 2012
Released (UPDATED 4/2)

Internet Explorer 10
Anticipated release: Between Q3 2012 and early 2013 (UPDATED 5/3

 
Office 2013
Anticipated release: Q4 2012 or Q1 2013(UPDATED 9/12)

Exchange 2013
Anticipated release: Q4 2012 (UPDATED 7/26)

Visual Studio 2012
Released (UPDATED 9/12)

Kinect for Windows
Released (UPDATED 9/4)

Windows Phone "Tango" and 8
"Tango": Released; Anticipated "Windows Phone 8" release: Q4 2012 (UPDATED 9/5)

Dynamics ERP Online
Anticipated release: September or October 2012 (UPDATED 7/20)

Office 365
Anticipated update schedule: "Almost weekly"(UPDATED 9/12)

Windows Azure
Rumored CTP release: Spring 2012 (UPDATED 9/7)

SharePoint 2013
Anticipated release: Q4 2012 (UPDATED 8/21)

Enjoy