September Update CTP for Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012

I have had a couple of people ask me about these new downloads appearing in MSDN downloads simply called something like: CTP of Quarterly Update for Visual Studio 2012 (x86) - (English).

Unfortunately these downloads contained no description other than:

“Statement of Support: This release has not been subject to final verification and validation, and is not intended to be run on production machines.”*

As Dave Lubash and Brian Harry posted both Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server will shipping new features every quarter(!)…

In addition to these production quality updates being released quarterly we will be releasing CTP quality updates with new features EVERY THREE WEEKS(!!)** -to enable you to look at these features and give us feedback.  

Going forward we will do a better job of letting you know what is in these builds but at a high level the Sept updates contain:

Feature Improvement: Visual Studio 2012

• Unit Test Grouping and Filtering in Test Explorer Window
• Code Map – add to map from editor, sxs map
• IntelliTrace
  • Added additional support for custom IntelliTrace Events
  • Enabled reading AVIcode to collect IntelliTrace Event Data
• Mixed Managed/Native Debugging Support for Windows Store Apps
  • Addressed issues with stepping through native code while mixed debugging
  • Improved inspection of native WinRT objects
  • Enabled remote debugging
• Improvements for loading symbols
• Faster and more responsive symbol loading experience for local/remote native debugging and remote managed debugging

Feature Improvement: Microsoft Test Manager

• Several experience improvements in test case management and manual testing.
• Support for hierarchical queries
• Added support for update notification

Feature Improvement: Team Foundation Server 2012 

(For more detailed information on these features please see: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/09/12/visual-studio-update-this-fall.aspx)

• Web Access navigation restyling and usability improvements
• Support for kanban including a board for the backlog, Work In Progress limits, and Continuous Flow Diagrams
• Ability to drag and drop a task in the board to another user story
• Ability to drag and drop a task in the board to assign it to another person
• Next and Previous buttons on the work item form in the triage view
• Links and Attachments tab in the work item form shows the count of contents
• Animation on the task board when a task is dragged
• Ability to drag and drop work items in the backlog to assign to a person or activity
• Improved error handling and messaging for Project Server Integration
• Updated process template versions for all the templates

If you do run into issues please let use know! 

How to Provide Feedback on this Release.  Feedback is an important part of this process. To supply feedback, please use the Visual Studio 2012 feedback tool, which can be located here. The feedback tool:

• Automatically marks your suggestions as private – feel free to make them public if you want people to see them and vote your issue higher in our prioritization.
• Automatically captures the build number, so we know any bugs/suggestions are for this technology preview to the update.

Statement of Support

Please note: as this is a Technology Preview, it is NOT meant to be run on production workstations or servers.  The testing of these CTPs is not as exhaustive and complete as the testing for the release product.  The recommended approach for upgrading Visual Studio on developer workstations is installing the latest Visual Studio Update 1 CTP on top of the RTM or a previous CTP build.   NOTE: since setup is updating the files during these updates there is NOT a “downgrade” path to get back to a previous release. 

WARNING: Do not install the CTP on a Team Foundation Server Production Server.  Unlike Visual Studio you can NOT upgrade Team Foundation Server once a CTP is applied and you can NOT attach a CTP TFS configuration database (which contains the Source, Work Items etc) to a released version of Team Foundation Server.

**The reason for every three weeks is so the scenario teams can get feedback on their last sprint.