Upgrading from Visual Studio 2012 RC to RTM

Heath Stewart

Now that Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 have been released, some customers are wondering if they need to uninstall the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate (RC) first before upgraded. In general, the answer is “no”. VS2012 RC will upgrade to RTM, but there are a few things to note:

  • You can only upgrade from RC to RTM using the same edition (ex: Ultimate RC to Ultimate RTM).
  • You can only upgrade from RC to RTM on Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2. VS2012 RTM is not supported on the Windows 8 Release Preview (RP) or older, so Windows 8 RTM needs to be installed first.
  • You cannot upgrade from VS2012 Beta to RTM – only from the RC. You can either upgrade from Beta to RC, or uninstall the Beta before installing RTM.

For more information about compatibility, see our compatibility page on the Visual Studio website.

If you need to uninstall VS2012 RC, we have posted instructions to KB2744926. For the most part, you only need to remove the main program entry in Programs and Features. While we have done a lot to reduce the number of “ARP” entries, some still remain from external partners which are not ref-counted in VS2012.

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