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Visual Studio Round Up

by Jeff Martin on Feb 22, 2013 |

February CTP for Visual Studio Update 2

Microsoft continues to release a steady stream of updates to the forthcoming Update 2 for Visual Studio 2012. The latest, Update 2 CTP 3, is available for download. As before, this is not yet ready for deployment to production environments. Microsoft's Brian Harry has noted that the next CTP will be a release suitable for such deployments.

This latest CTP continues to add new features. First is the addition of "Fakes" to Visual Studio Premium, whereas before they had only been available on Ultimate. Microsoft Test Manager will now support the cloning of test plans so that existing plans can easily be reused. Developers using HTML and JavaScript will benefit from the inclusion of a "UI Responsiveness Tool" aka Visual Profiler.

The web based test case management introduced in a prior CTP now supports the pausing and resuming of tests across time (days/weeks) as well as after reboots. Web based test cases have also gained the ability to add attachments.

DevLabs Moves to the Gallery

The Visual Studio Gallery has long been the home to various add-ons and extensions for Visual Studio. This week Microsoft announced that it has moved its DevLabs portal from MSDN to the Gallery. Now longer an independent section, DevLabs can be found simply by visiting the Gallery.

As Microsoft's S. Somasegar noted, several projects made their debut in DevLabs, including:

Code Contracts
CHESS, a tool for concurrency testing
Pex and Moles, another testing tool
Axum, an experimental .NET language for building parallel applications (language binaries remain available)