I've talked before in presentations that the ASP.NET and Web Tools team has been slowly externalizing pieces of ASP.NET. You've seen it in many pieces of the ASP.NET runtime moving into NuGet while also being open sourced, and you've seen it as we've moved big chunks of the "tooling" (that means the menus and dialogs you interact within Visual Studio when using ASP.NET) into external installers.

Why are we doing this? Because the Web moves faster than Visual Studio does. We want to be able to offer a stable ASP.NET core that you can count on while being able to offer new and powerful features more often as needed.

Visual Studio itself has moved to a faster update model and recently released Visual Studio 2012.1 (that's Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 if you prefer.) You can get the VS2012.1 update here or just wait for Visual Studio to popup some toast and let you know.

We're going to release an update to ASP.NET we'll call ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2. This will happen early next year but today you can download our Release Candidate! You can watch my presentation with Jon Galloway from the BUILD conference or read the release notes. This RC is, of course, newer than the one we released at BUILD and has a better name.

This is a tooling refresh of Visual Studio 2012 and extends the existing run time with new features without breaking existing applications. This adds new templates and features including:

Enhancements to Web Publishing unifying Web Application and Website project publish experience. Selective publish, local/remote diffs and more.

Page Inspector has enhancements including JavaScript selection mapping and ability to see CSS updates in real-time.

New Web API functionality including support for OData, tracing and generating a help page for your API.

New MVC templates You can create Facebook apps using the MVC Facebook template. In just a few easy steps you can create a Facebook Canvas Application that gets data from the logged in user as well and with friends. The return and refresh of an all-new Single Page Application template allows developers to build interactive web apps using Knockout JavaScript library and a RESTful Web API.

Real-time communication via SignalR. This means SignalR, in case you haven't heard, is a real and official thing. It's fully supported by Microsoft.

Extensionless Web Forms via ASP.NET Friendly URLs which makes it easy for web forms developers to generate clean URLs without the .aspx extension. This can be used with existing ASP.NET 4.0 applications as well! FriendlyURLs also makes it easier for developers to add mobile support to their applications, by supporting switching between desktop and mobile views.

Editor support for Knockout IntelliSense and pasting JSON as a class.

ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 installs quickly and does NOT alter the current ASP.NET run time components or change the GAC. For a complete description see the Release Notes.

ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update for Visual Studio 2012 can be installed from the Fall 2012 Update home page(http://www.asp.net/vnext/overview/fall-2012-update). This is an update to Visual Studio 2012, which is required. This Release Candidate update does not support localized versions yet. You see the new features in English but we'll will have localization support in upcoming RTM. It is an RC so there are some known issues. Be sure to check out the Release Notes for issues and workarounds.

Also be sure to get our "labs" component for Web Developers called Web Essentials. This is a place for Mads and the team to try out new features and play. When those features are baked, we'll graduate them to an update like this one!

Why isn't this called ASP.NET 4.6? Because it's not. The GAC'ed ASP.NET 4.5 doesn't change. This is mostly a tooling update as well as a collection of NuGet-based libraries that augment but don't replace ASP.NET 4.5. If we called if ASP.NET 4.6 then folks would think they needed to rush to update their servers. They don't. It's an update for "Web Tools for VS 2012" but that's lame, so since we got the VS guys to use the .1, .2, .3 scheme rather than September Update CTP Refresh, then we can make things easier by calling this Web Tools 2012.2.

This .2 release is just a step towards a more componentized "One ASP.NET." I hope you enjoy the direction we're heading. We've got some new things planned like a unified "File New ASP.NET Application" dialog, a better way to add your own templates and share them with the community, and a more level playing field for everyone.