I’m starting to receive mails from a number of people observing that their installs of the 2012 Release Candidate are approaching expiration on Jan 15.  That’s just over a week away.  I’m being asked if there’s some way to extend the expiration because the customer isn’t ready to upgrade.  Unfortunately, there is no way to extend the expiration.  The release candidate will cease to function on January 15th.  You will need to upgrade to the final release build in order to keep using the product. You can tell if you have a release candidate build by looking at the version number and look for “RCRel” – like “Version 11.0.50522.01 RCRel”.  That indicates that you have an RC build and will need to update by the 15th. Hopefully you’ve purchased the product and can install that.  If not, it is possible to upgrade to a 2012 trial edition and that will give you another 90 days to purchase and install the product.

Brian