Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 and Visual Studio 2012

Microsoft has made available the release candidates for the new Windows and the new Visual Studio tool set. Some of the products have been renamed:

• Windows Server 2012 is the new name for Windows 8 “Server”
• Visual Studio 2012 is the new name for Visual Studio 11

MSDN subscribers can download them from their account. If you’re not a subscriber you can use the following links:

• Windows 8 RC
• Windows Server 2012 RC
• Visual Studio 2012 RC

You can read more about these releases here:

• Windows:
  • Delivering the Windows 8 Release Preview
  • Creating the Windows 8 user experience
• Visual Studio:
  • Visual Studio:Announcing the Release Candidate (RC) of Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5
  • What’s New in Visual Studio 2012 RC

The only thing I’d like to mention at this point is that after butchering the Windows logo (no, I don’t believe in the ingenuity of the light blue rectangle) someone felt the need to do the same with the Visual Studio logo. And if I could live with the new Windows logo (the color is awful) the new Visual Studio logo is huge failure, in my opinion.

Yes, that’s right, the one in the right is the new VS2012 logo.

After seeing the things Microsoft has done to Windows and Visual Studio UI (especially the colors in Windows that knock you in the head and, the opposite, the lack of colors in VS) it looks like all UI experts left to Apple.