Installed Visual Studio 2012

Today I decided to take the step and upgrade from Visual Studio 2012 Professional to Visual Studio 2012 Premium so that I could take advantage of some of the language updates in .Net 4.5 and also be able to produce applications for the Windows Store. It also seemed like a good move as I can now get the software for free with the MSDNAA (Dreamspark Premium) account from my university.

I would have done it sooner but I knew it would probably be a long and laborious process trying to uninstall every element of my previous Visual Studio 2010 to then install the newer versions for 2012. I was not wrong. I really wish Microsoft would provide a good uninstaller for Visual Studio. At the moment the main uninstaller gets rid of just the main application, not any of the other stuff that it installs with it. You therefore have to manually go through your control panel trying to find things that may have been installed from VS 2010 - which takes a long time considering that Windows uninstallers are not the quickest of things at the best of times.

When I was finally able to get rid of just about everything, the installation process for Visual Studio 2012 went through without a hitch (the same for which could not be said for 2010). The installer itself was also very nicely designed and seemed to me at least faster than for VS 2010.

Here are a few screenshots -

I really like the look and feel of the new styled interface so far. However I may have to try and figure out a way of reverting back to the old non-capitalised versions of the menu items.