Sometime this spring, though for the life of me I can't find it, I wrote a blog post where I said I thought Update 3 (VS/TFS 2012.3) would be the last update in the VS/TFS 2012 update line. I often say that nothing that is said about the future is more than a guess with varying levels of confidence. So, it turns out that I was wrong. A month or two ago we decided that we were going to need to do a 2012.4 release.
The primary motivation is addressing compatibility and migration/round-tripping issues between VS 2012 and VS 2013 and the various platform releases to make adoption of VS 2013 as smooth as possible. The planned timing will be around the same time VS 2013 releases (and, of course, I can't give any more detail at this time other than saying that it will be before the end of the year). Once we decide to ship a release like this, it then becomes a vehicle to deliver anything else that would be valuable/important to deliver in that timeframe. So, for instance Update 4 will also include a roll up of fixes for all important customer reported by the time it locks down.
Like Update 3, Update 4 will be a very scoped release just focused on these compatibility fixes and key customer impacting bug fixes. We will not be delivering significant new features in Update 4. I qualify it with "significant" because what is a feature and what is a bug fix is in the eye of the beholder.
Today we released the first Release Candidate for Update 4....
Read more: Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day
Read more: VISUAL STUDIO 2012 UPDATE 4 RC 1
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