If you’ve read our post Designing Metro style Apps in Blend and VS—What’s new in RC? you’ll know that we’ve made some pretty significant improvements in performance and stability, and we’ve invested in new features to increase productivity and usability.  If you’re curious for more details, read on.  In this post you’ll find the big list of what we’ve been working on between the Consumer Preview and the Release Candidate of Blend—for authoring both XAML and HTML5 apps.

Let us know what you think.  You can contact us via this site.  You can also help the community by filing any bugs you encounter.

As in previous releases, there is no more need to download Blend separately – it is now part of every VS download that targets any of the supported platforms, including Express for Windows 8, which is free, as well as Professional, and Ultimate. In other words, if you have Visual Studio 2012, chances are good that you have Blend.

You can download Visual Studio 2012 and Blend RC and Windows 8 Release Preview now.

What’s new in RC for designing Metro apps in VS and Blend

In addition to many bug fixes that improve stability and quality for many scenarios, we have added several new features for XAML authoring.

Project Templates

• A new project template has been added to C# and VB to help you create Windows Runtime Components.
• The templates have been updated to support Process Lifetime Management (PLM) behavior.  This is handled by a new SuspensionManager class that has been added to the Common folder.  Pages will now save and load state upon being suspended or resumed.
• The Blank app has been simplified to remove components that are not required.  An option to add these common components will be provided when an item template that requires them is added.
• The templates now support virtualization by default.  GridView and ListView now take advantage of a header region allowing the bound items to be virtualized.  In addition, the landing page for the GridApp now supports only showing a subset of items, rather than the entire collection allowing for better performance.
• Navigation has been improved for the templates as the templates now fully support keyboard and mouse navigation (back and forward buttons and keyboard shortcuts now work).
• Entrance animations have been added to all pages (other than the Blank Page as it still remains blank).

XAML Compiler Performance

• Incremental builds for all languages in Metro apps are now twice as fast as compared to Beta.
• Rebuild/full build scenarios have also significantly improved.

VS XAML Designer for Metro style apps

• View state authoring – You can now preview and author pages using Visual States to tool the platform Application View States (FullScreenLandscape, FullScreenPortrait, Filled, and Snapped) using the Device Panel (renamed from Platform panel in Beta).  The Device Panel will now automatically change visual states when the View is changed.  Turning recording mode on will enable changes made on the Design Surface or Property Inspector to alter the currently selected visual state rather than always making changes to Base.
• There have been significant performance and stability improvements in a several areas including loading documents, manipulating elements on the design surface, style/template editing, as well as making edits to the XAML directly.
• The Design and Format menus in the Main menu bar now contain many of the designer commands previously only available in the context menus.
• F1 help is now available.

XAML Metro style apps in Blend

• View state authoring – You can now preview and author pages using Visual States to tool the platform Application View States (FullScreenLandscape, FullScreenPortrait, Filled, and Snapped) using the Device Panel (renamed from Platform panel in Beta).  The Device Panel will now automatically change visual states when the View is changed.  Turning recording mode on will enable changes made on the Design Surface or Property Inspector to alter the currently selected visual state rather than always making changes to Base.
• You can now design and preview Visual States with theme animations from the Animation Library using Blend’s Visual State design feature. The Animation Library is a suite of Metro-style animations that has been built specifically to take advantage of the platform’s animation capability. These animations are used throughout Windows UI and are also available for your Metro app.
• There have been significant performance and stability improvements in several areas including loading documents, manipulating elements on the design surface, style/template editing.

What’s new in RC for designing Metro Style apps with HTML in Blend

Since Beta, we have made significant improvements to performance in element selection and the CSS Properties pane. We have also made some great productivity improvements in almost every area of Blend.

Productivity Features
We have focused on productivity since Beta and have improved productivity throughout the product.

• Cut, Copy & Paste of CSS Properties and Style Rules
• Cut, Copy & Paste of elements on the artboard and Live DOM
• Edit the CSS Properties and HTML attributes of multiple elements at the same time
• “Create a style rule from element class/id” via context menu on any element
•  “Add/Remove class” via context menu on any element
• All searchable panes better indicate when a search filter is applied
• Interactive Mode prompt for saving and reloading changes

HTML Attributes Pane
Additional value editors and better organization make the HTML Attributes Panel even easier to use.

• Value editor for creating classes in HTML Attributes pane
• Improvements in HTML attribute organization
• Addtion of HTML5 data attributes
• Value editors appear for dynamically created custom attributes

Artboard Improvements
Improvements in design tools, and artboard adorners make it even easier to work directly with elements on the artboard.

• Added Grid lines and Snap to Grid lines
• Turn on/off adorners
• Zoom to fit on creation of a new project
• Select All of elements on the artboard
• Margin box and value indicators
• Padding box indicators
• Improvements to resize inside a grid
• Indicates when an element is transformed

Project Pane Improvements
Improvements in the Projects Panel make it easier to work with files in your project, and provide an even more seamless experience when working with Visual Studio 11.

• “Yes to All” option when files have been edited outside of Blend
• New Project Dialog Reorganization
• Add New Folder to Project

Live DOM Improvements
More information about your elements in the Live DOM make working with project even easier.

• Identify elements that have been moved or reparented by JavaScript
• Elements hovered in the live DOM show a matching indicator on the artboard

Styling Improvements
New views, intellisense for selectors, and more control over where your rules apply are just a few of the styling improvements.

• Visually identify media queries that do not apply to the current design surface view state
•  “View by Source” for Winning Properties
• Working with CSS Selectors is improved with intellisense and indication of syntactically invalid CSS selectors
• “Insert style rule” at an arbitrary location in the Styles panes

Data Improvements
More data features to improve working with data.

• Ability to set bindings on HTML attribute and CSS Properties directly via the Properties Marker
• Improved synchronization between the artboard and the code editor when editing item templates
• Less need to refresh when making changes to your item template or setting your data source on a ListView

CSS Property pane improvements
More value editors, and more info make working with properties seamless.

• Style CSS3 gradients and 2D CSS transforms
• Easily set the URL for an image
• User is notified when properties in property pane are unrecognized
• Enter calc() expressions directly in property pane

Control improvements:
More ways to interact with WinJS controls.

• Live values for control properties
• Basic tooling for HTMLControl (value editor)
• Show rich error information in the results panel when a WinJS control throws an exception
• Improvements in UI to switch between SemanticZoom views  and activating Flyout & Menu controls
• Overlay controls preserve their visibility state after being rebuilt
• New value editors for AppBarCommand icon property, AppBarCommand & MenuCommand Flyout