Today, we announced that the Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate is now available for download on our Visual Studio product site.
We are also excited to share that the Visual Studio 2013 Launch is on Nov 13th 2013. Save the date to participate in all the excitement, more details about the event can be found on the events page.
Visual Studio 2013 RC works seamlessly side-by-side with Visual Studio 2012. It can also be installed on top of Visual Studio 2013 Preview without having to uninstall Preview. However, please note that, Windows Store app development requires Windows 8.1 RTM, which is available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Visual Studio 2013 RC does not support Windows 8.1 Preview or Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview. For more information, see system requirements and platform compatibility.
When you first launch RC, you will be asked to sign in. Read about our plans for signing in to Visual Studio at our post from Preview. Similar to Preview, you can continue using Visual Studio for the 14 day trial period without signing in. We’ve made sign in required for Preview and RC, but as we said in our Preview post, sign in will be optional in the final Visual Studio 2013 release. When you sign in to Visual Studio 2013 RC, your custom settings from Visual Studio 2013 Preview will automatically get synchronized to RC. We’ve had over 80K unique users that signed into Preview, and this helped us find and fix a number of issues in this area. RC is a better product because of you!
What’s new since Preview
Since the release of Preview, we’ve been hard at work improving this release and addressing top customer feedback from Preview. You can find some of the top updates in the RC on Somasegar’s Blog.
Feedback received through diagnostics, telemetry, bugs, blog comments, and through send-a-smile helped us improve our product since Preview, fix bugs such as sign-in problems from behind a proxy server, and introduce new features such as integrating your IDE sign in with your TFS accounts and auto-connect you. Please keep the feedback coming with RC!
For additional information on what’s new, please see the “What’s New” page on Microsoft.com, the Visual Studio 2013 RC Toolbox show on Channel9, and the Project Compatibility reference on MSDN. One example of new features you’ll find in these locations is that we’ve added the ability to edit in the Peek window, as an addition to the Visual Studio 2013 New Editor Features.
Feedback
Thank you for all the feedback! It has immensely helped us improve Visual Studio and take it from Preview to RC.
We received a lot of feedback through the send-a-smile tool because of its easy accessibility from within Visual Studio. You’ll notice that the drop down for feedback now includes “send-a-smile”, “send-a-frown”, as well as “report a bug”. To send general thoughts and sentiments on the release please use send-a-smile, and to report a bug please use the report-a-bug option from the dropdown in the top right corner of the IDE. If you have the VS Feedback Tool installed, that will allow you to report a bug directly from the IDE. If not, this menu item will bring you to the Visual Studio Connect site.
We also want to hear your suggestions or feature ideas/improvements so please add your suggestions to UserVoice or vote on other user’s suggestions. For Q&A please use the Forums and for in-production support only you can contact Support.
Enjoy!
The Visual Studio Team