They’re out, folks. Few minutes ago Marc flipped the switch on the refresh of the WIF tools for the RC of Visual Studio 2012. There’s not a lot of news, this was mostly a stabilization effort; if you want to learn about what the tools do, the original posts we did for Beta are still valid. Also, last week I gave a presentation at TechEd USA about what’s new in WIF 4.5: the tools took a fairly big portion of the talk, so if you prefer videos to written text head to the recording on Channel9.

Here there are some sparse comments on the release:

• We fixed tens of bugs, significantly improving the stability of the experience. Thank you all for your feedback, which helped us to track those down!
• The RC of the tool still requires you to run VS as administrator. That’s unfortunate, I know: we are looking into it. However I have to give you a heads-up: during the TechEd talk I asked to the audience (~150) who would not be able to use the tools at all if they’d require running VS as administrator, and only 3 raised their hands. If the running as admin is a complete blocker for you, please leave comments to this post or in the tools download pages ASAP. Thanks!
• Now for the good news: once you install the RC of the tools, the WIF samples released for Beta will keep working in VS 2012 RC without modifications

That’s it. Download, code away & be merry!