Two weeks ago, I shared that final builds of Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 had been created, and that they’d be available for MSDN Subscribers on August 15th.  Well, today is August 15th, and I’m excited to announce that the bits are live and ready to go.

How can you get them?

  • If you’re an MSDN Subscriber, you can download them today from MSDN Subscriber Downloads.
  • If you want the free Visual Studio Express 2012 products, or free trial versions of Visual Studio 2012, you can download them from here.  Visual Studio Express for Windows 8, Visual Studio Express for Web, and Team Foundation Server Express are all now available.  Express for Windows Phone and Express for Windows Desktop will be available later this fall.
  • If you want to install .NET 4.5 separately, you can get it from http://www.microsoft.com/net.
  • For volume licensing customers, Visual Studio 2012 products will be available starting tomorrow (August 16th) from the Volume Licensing Servicing Center.
  • Packaged products will begin to show up in stores next month, with some products available for purchase digitally in selected regions starting in the next few days (visit the Visual Studio product website for details).

For all of you excited to use Visual Studio 2012 to develop for Windows Azure, the Windows Azure SDK for .NET – June 2012 release has been updated to work with these bits.  The recent Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 release has also been updated accordingly.

With Visual Studio 2012, we’re delivering a productive and powerful development experience, one that makes it easy to develop on your own or as part of a collaborative team, all the while building apps that target the latest platforms.  The interesting question for every developer out there is - what app will you build today?  We look forward to discussing it more with you during the Visual Studio 2012 Launch Event on September 12th.

I’m also excited today to announce another release.  As part of Visual Studio 2012, we updated Blend to provide a terrific experience for designing Windows Store apps that use HTML and XAML, and we incorporated its designer into Visual Studio for use with all XAML platforms.  However, the RTM release of Visual Studio 2012 does not include support in Blend for designing WPF 4.5 or Silverlight 5 applications.  Today, we’re releasing Blend + SketchFlow Preview for Visual Studio 2012, a preview of Blend that does support all XAML platforms and includes SketchFlow.  Download it from here, and visit the BlendInsider blog for more details on the release.

Namaste!