My Hands On with –Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Visual Studio 11 and SQL Server 2012

Recent days there has been some amazing releases by Microsoft such as long awaited Windows 8 Consumer Preview with lots of changes since Windows 8 Developer Preview.

Windows 8™ is latest operating system by Microsoft – is mainly targeting Tablet and touch enabled devices which can hold the windows 8 operating system. Windows 8 consumer preview consists of latest set Windows Apps from Windows Market, so that early adaptors and consumer market can evaluate the features of windows 8.

Visual Studio™ 11 is latest version of Visual Studio family offering from Microsoft – having improvements over previous version and more revamped UI which makes the similar attire of Metro UI. Since it has been termed as Visual Studio 11, there is lots of confusion among the developers – some call it as Visual Studio 2011 and actually it is Visual Studio version 11. Since the release date of final built is unknown Microsoft is stick to call it as Version 11, rather than calling it as Visual Studio 2012.

Visual Studio™ 11 BETA is released on 29th Feb 2012, the very same day Windows 8 Consumer Preview was unveiled. This gives us an indication that later some time in year 2012 Visual Studio 11 Final version will be released to manufacture.

SQL Server™ 2012 RTM(release-to-manufacture) is unveiled on 07th March 2012 – includes cloud centric features of SQL Server.

I give it a try of all of them together on my laptop today. Following are the series of steps I following with my initial review of all of the together.

1. Installed Windows 8 Consumer Preview

2. Installed Visual Studio 11 Ultimate

3. Install SQL Server 2012 – 180 Day Trial

Windows 8 installation went fine and I didn’t have to look for any drivers as the installation itself included most of the drivers for my laptop with core i3 – 4gb.

Attaching some screenshot of working copy.

 

The point is I love Windows 8 because of it’s smoothness comparing to other windows. It is indeed going to be a very good platform for Tablet and Touch enabled devices.  Metro UI seems innovative because of the simplicity it offers and hats off to Microsoft for bringing it on to windows.

Internet Explorer 10 accompanied with Windows 8 Consumer Preview has a very good support for HTML5 comparing to IE 9.0. It scored over 314 points out of 450 when I run a test over http://www.html5test.com

Visual Studio 11 is fast comparing to Visual Studio 2010 and has built in support for building Metro based applications.

SQL Server 2012 installation was pretty straight forward and faster on windows 8, everything went smoothly on windows 8 and I am evaluating other features of SQL Server 2012. I leave my comments on those on my later posts. 

Need to do few Metro Apps using Visual Studio 11. It would be an awesome experience to work with cutting edge technologies such as Visual Studio 11, Windows 8 and SQL Server 2012.

Thanks Microsoft for Providing evaluation versions of all the software’s needed. I am not giving references to software links in this post, you may can look through my preview posts for download links.

That’s all for now. Happy Coding!