IntelliTrace can be used to collect and analyze the data in production. IntelliTrace speeds debugging by showing history of what happened in your application while you run. This reduces how often you restart the application when you want look at past events. IntelliTrace automatically collects information about events when you start debugging. Some examples of events exceptions, break points and dot net events. You can also use IntelliTrace for calls information.

Configuring IntelliTrace in VS 2012

To turn on IntelliTrace Collection, Open Visual Studio Tools Menu then click options then tick mark the Enable IntelliTrace check box



You can select IntelliTrace Events and choose the events and event categories that you want to collect. You can examine the values for variables , inputs and outputs for functions and procedures. Selecting an event takes you to the code where that event happened.



You can then use the standard debugging windows to review the application state and examine the collected value. You can collect and save this information to a file.



This file contains the information about exceptions, web requests, test steps and other appropriate data. This file helps you to debug your application after crash and identify how to reproduce bugs.

Collecting the information from Applications in Production

You can use stand-alone collector to get IntelliTrace information about applications that are in production. You can use Power-Shell commands to collect the data and delete the collector when you are done. You can download this tool from here



IntelliTrace collects the information with-out interrupting applications operations data. You can now open the file in Visual Studio 2012 , if the application is web then you can select the specific web request and see the details as shown below



After selecting a particular web request then you will get all the associated events to that request , You can select a specific event and choose start debugging



Visual Studio takes you to the code where the event happened , Now you can use standard VS debugging experience with IntelliTrace to examine the collected values. You can definitely save debugging time using IntelliTrace by using applications history and state without restarting. It provides more debugging information and capabilities to find and fix bugs faster.

API reference for extensibility can found here

Let's start with the new functionalities introduced in Visual Studio 2012 RC.

Recent Project List

Though this was available in earlier versions of Visual Studio, the option to remove a project from the list is now not available; you can remove unwanted projects from the "Recent" list by selecting the "Remove From List" option. (Right-click on the project you want to remove from the list then select "Remove From List".)

You can even see the latest Visual Studio GUI in the following screen shot:

Visual Studio Dark Theme

I have seen so many developers that don't like the default Visual Studio GUI color and they prefer to code using a dark background. Most of them go to Tools-> Options and change the default color and fonts.

But now you can do this by just changing the Visual Experience. Select Tools -> Options then click on "General" from the "Environment" section. You have the option to select "Dark" or "Light". This is really cool stuff. You can even download themes online.





Visual Studio Installation Engine Improvement

The Visual Studio 2012 installation has become very user-friendly compared to previous versions of Visual Studio. You can save almost 25% of installation time and save about 2.5 GB of space. There is significant improvement in the installation engine.

Other Features

Metro Style Application Development

This is the greatest feature and only available for the Window 8 operating system. To develop a Metro style application, you need to download and install the Windows 8 Release Preview Evaluation copy which is freely available on the Microsoft site. Once you install the Window 8 Release Preview, install Visual Studio 2012 RC.

Select File -> New -> Project which will open the "New Project" window. Select Visual C# or Visual Basic from the Template (my favorite is Visual C#) and go to "Windows Metro style".

Here you have the options to select the kind of Metro style application you want to develop.

(Note: Metro style applications are only available for .Net Framework 4.0 and .Net Framework 4.5.)