Introduction:

Microsoft recently launched the Visual Studio 11 Developers Preview in BUILD Conference and its available for download to all as a preview. So here in this article we are going to see how to download and install the Visual Studio 11 developer preview version on a Windows 7 environment.

Steps:

Visual Studio 11 Developers Preview is available as a free download from the MSDN link http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.php?id=27538 Many new features have been released with this version such as

• Asynchronous Programming
• Call Hierarchy
• .Net for Metro Style Applications
• Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
• etc..

Visual Studio 11 can be installed in the latest Windows Server 8 or Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. Let us see the step by step process on installing it on to a windows 7 environment. Once we download the ISO file and extract it using the ISO image extractor we can see a list of files as shown in the screen below.

From the list of files shown in the above screen, right click on the vs_ultimate application file and click on Run As Administrator. We can see that the Visual Studio 11 installation wizard gets opened with a nice Splash screen as shown in the screen below.

We can now see the installation wizard opened with requesting for the location to install the Visual Studio 11 Developer preview and some licenses terms and conditions as shown in the screen below. We can just click on the Install button directly to start installing the application or click on Customize your Installation as shown in the screen below.

Clicking on Customize your Installation will move on to next window with a nice graphical slide out and we can see the list of options to customize it based on our requirement. Since our requirement is to look out with the web development tools just select Web Development Tools check box and click on Install to start the installation as shown in the screen below.

Now we can see the installation is started and the installation first acquires the list of packages to be installed and then apply the packages to the environment as shown in the screen below.

Once the required packages are acquired it starts applying the packages one by one in the requisites order as shown in the screen below.

Initially Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview requires a system reboot, this doesn’t mean that the installation is completed though we need to reboot the system to proceed further. Click on Reboot Now as shown in the screen below to proceed further.

Once the system gets rebooted the Visual Studio 11 Developer preview installation wizard will start by itself and once again it will start acquiring the required packages as shown in the screen below.

Some of the important packaging applying screen shots are shown below which is self understanding.

Once all the packages are installed and the installation is completed we can see the success message as shown in the screen below. So we can see all the specified components are installed successfully. Now click on Launch Now to launch the Visual Studio 11 Developers Preview.

We can see the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview version splash screen started as shown in the screen below.

We can now see a new window(Default Environment Settings) which gets triggered only for the first time after successful installation as shown in the screen below.

Select General Development Settings and click on Start Visual Studio as shown in the screen below.

Now we can see the Visual Studio 11 Developers Preview IDE opened as shown in the screen below. We can right away click on the New Project button to see the list of templates available as shown in the screen below.

Clicking on New Project will open the window as shown in the screen below which has the list of templates based on the language and we can see that it points to .NET Framework 4.5.

From the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview IDE, go to help menu and click on About Visual Studio 11 and we can see the expiration date for the developer studio as shown in the screen below.

Conclusion:

So in this article we have seen how to download and install the Visual Studio 11  Developers Preview on to a Windows 7 environment. In our upcoming articles we will see on the new features available with the VS 11.