As you know Visual Studio 2012 RTM’d and then became available in August (Soma’s blog posts told you that here and here), and the VS2012 launch was earlier this month (Soma also told you that here). Every time a release of Visual Studio takes place I am very excited, since this has been my development tool of choice for almost my entire career (from many years before I joined Microsoft). I am doubly excited with this release since it is the second version of Visual Studio that I have worked on and contributed major features to, now that I’ve been in the developer division (DevDiv) for over 4 years.

Additionally, I am very excited about the new era that VS2012 starts with VSUpdate for continued customer value: instead of waiting for the next major version of VS to get new features, there is new infrastructure to enable friction-free updates. The first update will ship before the end of this year, and you can read more about it at Brian’s blog post. I also noticed that a CTP of the first quarterly update is available to download here.

In the last two months, the VS2012 family of products we all worked on in DevDiv shipped, coinciding with the end of the Microsoft financial/review year, and naturally followed by a couple of organizational changes (e.g. see Jason’s blog post)… On a personal level, this meant that I was very lucky to have an opportunity present itself to me that I simply could not turn down, so I grabbed it! I’ll still be working on Visual Studio, but not in the Parallel Computing part of the C++ team; instead I will be PM-leading the VS Diagnostics team… Stay tuned for details of what is coming in that space, in the VS updates and in the next major VS release, as I am able to share them…