Microsoft has released the second update for Visual Studio 2012 just four months since the release of the previous update. The release is part of Microsoft’s pledge to ship updates for VS in "a regular cadence".

The frequency of the update cycle means that this update, like the previous one, is mainly bug fixes and performance improvements, though there are some new features included this time.

According to Soma Somasegar's blog post announcing the release, its main new features primarily span:

“five areas of investment: agile planning, quality enablement, Windows Store development, line-of-business development, and the general developer experience.”

Agile planning refers to improvements in Team Foundation Server. New project tracking options including a Kanban board were added in the last update, and you can now customize the board to adapt it for an organization’s needs, so you can add your own columns to the traditional categories of backlog, development, test and customer feedback.

Somasegar says that other new features include work item tagging for a flexible way to add metadata to work items, and the ability to email work items via the TFS Web Access portal.

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The update adds more tools for software testing so you can now carry out manual ASP.NET testing and cross-browser testing. You can also profile unit tests and see the results across both the unit tests and the code under test in a single report. Unit testing support for Windows Phone 8 apps has also been added.

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Other improvements in the update, which can be dowloaded for free, include a new profiling tool for JavaScript apps that you can use to work out why your UI is unresponsive; and the inclusion of the latest version of the Windows App Certification Kit.

The IDE has been improved with integration between code map and the debugger integration, and performance improvements to XAML design when loading large projects and when using third-party controls. Finally, developers who hate both the light and dark themes in the IDE can now swap to a third, blue theme.

This video has a detailed walkthrough of the features: