The public release of Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is now available and can be downloaded. Please visit Jason Zander’s Blog for the download links and overview of the new features.

We have many great features in the preview. We’ll discuss some of them in the future blogs. Scott Guthrie has a blog “ASP.NET vNext Series‘ which links to the detail of many ASP.NET 4.5 features.

Here is a few features included in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview:

• JavaScript editor is rewritten, and is now based on IE10’s JavaScript engine. Many new features are added for the JavaScript editor to support it as a first class citizen programming language, such as go to definition, outlining, brace matching, etc.
• New CSS editor functionalities include new formatter, validator, snippets, color picker, comment support, hierarchical indentation, vendor specific IntelliSense.
• New HTML editor functionalities include source view smart task, better auto indentation, end-tag matching when editing start-tag, server side event handler generation, extract to user control and more.
• IIS Express is now the default website and web application host instead of ASP.NET Development Server (i.e. cassini).
• LocalDB is the default database for Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. LocalDB uses the same database engine as other SQL server code name “Denali” CTP3 (like Express, Standard and Enterprise), so it supports expected SQL functionality like tables, stored procedures, etc.  LocalDB is sandboxed so one user’s interactions do not affect other users.  LocalDB also makes it easy for developers to create and work with multiple SQL instances.
• SQL Server Database Projects – Visual Studio offers a new project type that makes it easy for developers to build and deploy their SQL Server databases.  Developers can quickly and easily add tables, stored procedures, scripts etc. to their SQL Server project and the structures are stored as SQL scripts, which makes it easy to manage the history of the database via source code control and make it easy to deploy the database to SQL Server instances from Express to Azure.
• Publishing for Web Application Projects (WAP) have been updated. Publishing profiles are now designed for team scenarios and are stored into a separate folder, allowing proper version control and usage from MSBuild/Team Build. You can configure your WAP to be precompiled/merged before publishing on the Package/Publish Web tab under the Project Properties.

Here’s more resources to help you start coding:

• Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview
• .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview
• http://www.asp.net/vnext , where you can learn all the upcoming features in asp.net vnext

Please note we are shipping some features through Web Platform Installer, such as MVC next and page inspector showed by Scott in BUILD. Please check back on our blog and scottgu’s blog for announcement.  

Please also note developer preview features may get changed between now and Beta time.  Feedbacks are always welcome, you can use asp.net forum to provide feedbacks.

Enjoy!

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