Visual Studio 2012, Update 3 Ready for Production
The third update of Visual Studio 2012 has progressed to Release Candidate (RC) stage, and is now available as a "go-live" version, meaning you can put it on a production server.
The first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of VS 2012, Update 3 was released last month. That iteration wasn't for production. This RC version of Update 3 is for both Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS), Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry wrote on his blog.
Microsoft, Harry said, has put the Update 3 RC into production, and its go-live process "found 8 or 10 TFS bugs for Update 2," and those have been fixed in the RC. Charles Sterling, on Microsoft's TFS blog, said that about 20 user issues and requests were addressed with Update 3.
Sterling added that two frequently-requested features were added: "continuous integration for Team Projects using Git, and the ability to pick the specific branch in the repo you wanted built." This functionality's available via a new source settings dialog in the build definition wizard.
Some of the issues that were fixed include problems with the debugger, the Visual Studio IDE itself, a number of C++ bugs, numerous TFS fixes and upgrades, and a crash issue when developing Web projects. A Knowledgebase article has a full listing of improvements.
Harry noted in his blog that Update 3 is a minor update compared to Updates 1 and 2. You can find it here.
(Note that there are different installation methods between Visual Studio and TFS: the Visual Studio version of Update 3 installs on top of a previous version, while the TFS update replaces whatever's currently installed. Because of that, make sure your databases are fully backed up; if the installation fails and you haven't backed up, you're cooked.)
Posted by Keith Ward on 05/08/2013