Visual Studio 2012 Features

.NET Framework 4.5

 With .NET 4.5, there have many updates to the core languages, with the asynchronous programming. If you plan to build Windows 8 applications, then you need .NET 4.5, because it has a subset called .NET for Windows Store. Building Windows 8 applications means you will be using HTML5 andCSS3, which are embraced by ASP.NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012. Web Sockets support has been added, as well as the ability to bundle JavaScript libraries/code and minimize the size of its download. ASP.NET Web Pages 2 provides more features for building pages on the fly, and improvements have been made to Web Forms and MVC. These features and more can be used to build powerful applications via the Visual Studio 2012 IDE. However, you can still target any version of the framework — that’s right, you are not forced to upgrade to .NET 4.5.

New IDE

Visual Studio 2012 is includes LightSwitch, Silverlight, and Expression Blend. The first two are project types within the IDE . Expression Blend is installed as a separate application in the Visual Studio 2012 directory, but it is available only for Windows Store app development on Windows 8.

Integration with other Microsoft products

Developing with Microsoft technologies is the tight integration with other Microsoft products. Visual Studio 2012 simplifies this by providing the environment to build applications that use these products. The following list provides a sampling of the possibilities:

• PowerPoint: Use PowerPoint to begin the development process according to Agile methods with storyboarding (Microsoft has wholeheartedly embraced Agile). PowerPoint Storyboarding is a selection in the Visual Studio 2012 installation folder. In addition to PowerPoint, the complete Microsoft Office suite is available programmatically to use as needed in your code.
• Windows 8: Build applications for the new version of Windows.
• Windows Phone: Visual Studio 2012 allows you to target multiple platforms such as Windows Phone.
• SharePoint: Visual Studio 2012 allows you to build and test SharePoint applications.
• Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2012: Large scale projects require teamwork and source code control, both of which are readily provided in TFS 2012, which seamlessly integrates with Visual Studio 2012.
• System Center 2012: This can be used with TFS 2012 to automate the identification of production errors/bugs and to create tasks to fix these issues.

-- Source TechRepublic