Hello, I'm   Jason

One of my colleagues found out earlier today that a project he recently upgraded to Visual Studio 2012 was broken. What caused this? The setup project that was added to his solution. Back on July 15th, 2010, a program manager from Microsoft posted that Microsoft was abandoning the Visual Studio 2012 setup options in favor of InstallShield LE. While InstallShield does have it’s purpose and many consider it to be the best (or only) real setup solution out there, the Microsoft team offers no standalone installer out of the box. This means developers must be forced to use ClickOnce, Windows Store, InstallShield LE, or another product they purchase.

During early builds of Visual Studio 2012, many developers griped and complained about the lack of color within the application. By the time VS2012 has RTM’d, two themes shipped with VS2012. There is a light theme and a dark theme.

So you’ve downloaded Windows 8, installed it on your box, and are ready to get virtual machines (VMs) setup. Now what? In Windows 7 days, this could be accomplished by using Virtual PC or VirtualBox (an offering from Oracle). With Windows 8, VirtualBox is still available. However, Windows 8 comes with a new feature that’s been available for several years from Microsoft in Windows Server called Hyper-V.

Wow. The next two weeks has a lot in store for us. There’s a lot that will be announced and released in the next two weeks. Let’s start with today and detail out the next 8 days:

Begin your 30-day journey to create a great Windows 8 app. Get started here and receive:

After much anticipation, Windows 8 is now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. There are two versions to download. One version is Windows 8 which has Windows 8 Pro capabilities (with the appropriate key). The other is Windows 8 Enterprise which requires a KMS or adding the key using a script (as blogged about here).

If you are downloading the new Windows 8 Enterprise edition from MSDN or TechNet today (as a Volume License Customer) and plan on adding in your volume license, you can do so without the need for a Key Management Server (KMS). To do so, run a command prompt as Administrator and enter the following:

Much like Windows 8, many developers have been anticipating the release of Visual Studio 2012. Earlier today, Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2012 Team System were made available to subscribers of MSDN. Non-subscribers of MSDN can download a 90 day trial of Visual Studio 2012 for free at http://jasong.us/PoRAPn.

Now that Office 2013 is out, I wanted to check out the new SharePoint 2013. I downloaded the ISO, mounted it in my brand new installation of Windows Server 2012, and clicked setup.exe (no auto run executed on mounting). After a couple of minutes, I was greeted with the following: