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Vinay's Brain Dump

A place for my thoughts, learning and research.

A Journey to RC from Beta for VS 2012 and Windows 8

by Vinay

OK, so VS 2012 RC came out on Thursday along with Windows 8 RC. The new version contains some exciting features and they are very nicely explained by Scott Hanselman in his blog

I wasn't a very early adopter for Windows 8 and VS 2012, infact I only had Windows 8 CP installed on my Touchsmart last week (and yes it hurts to go through the same exercise again in a week), but as soon as I read that RC is out, I had to give it a shot.

Upgrading Windows 8

I already had Windows 8 CP running on my touchsmart along with Windows 7 on a different partition. Unlike some previous versions, Windows 8 team have made the upgrade as smooth as possible. For a starter, you don't even have to download a stand alone copy of Windows 8 ( you still can if you want to), you can download the Windows8-ReleasePreview-UpgradeAssistant which is only a small installer but it will provide you a step by step guide and will even install the Windows 8 for you.

The other option is to download a copy of Windows 8 in ISO Format, burn it to disk or a bootable USB and intall a fresh copy.

For me, I chose the long way :), as I already had ISO format installed, I mounted it while still in Windows 8 mode (using Windows 8 inbuilt mounting feature ) and upgraded it, mind you, it did wiped all the libraries and files, but in my case, I only had CP installed a week ago, so I had nothing to loose. Once the setup finished, I was up and running again :)

Upgrading Visual Studio 2012 (you can call it VS 11 if you'd like)

Ok, so I made one mistake, I from previous experience, went straight in and uninstalled .NET 4.5 beta, VS 2012 and all other dependencies, and then I read Scott's blog and realised that you don't need to uninstall the beta, you can install the RP straight on top of beta, oh well...

 

So now I have Windows 8 RP, VS 2012 RC and I am ready to start building Metro Apps and also exploring new features of VS.

 

I'll blog soon about new features of VS and also will start blogging on Metro apps.

Till them, I'll go an enjoy my Windows 8 :)

 

PS: oh one thing I forgot to mention, even though my HP touchsmart is a multi touch (2 point touch), its not very smooth when it comes to using all the cool gestures and touch features of Windows 8, but none the less, it's still fun.