PHP is one of the most popular programming languages for server-side web development. It's used in many frameworks and CSMs like WordPress, Laravel, Symfony, and others which are behind a sizable chunk of the Internet. Visual Studio is a powerful IDE, but its focus didn’t align with some languages, PHP being one of them. As time progressed more ...

A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation at a conference about cool new features in Visual Studio 2022. It was a pre-recorded presentation, so I was able to do final edits to the video before sending it to the conference organizers. The result was a 38-minute-long video highlighting some of my favorite new features, tweaks, and extensions. And the be...

You want to share some code you’ve written with a colleague, so you select it in the editor and hit Ctrl+C to copy it. As you paste it in Outlook/Slack/Teams, you realize that the indentation levels are inconsistent due to your original selection. You must now either go back to Visual Studio and do a box selection and copy that, or manually fix the...

As developers, we often need to compare two files to find the differences. Sometimes, even comparing the content of the clipboard with a file on disk. And again, sometimes comparing our local changes to previous versions from our Git commit history. There is no straightforward way in Visual Studio to do those things today, but in this month’s exper...

When dealing with deeply nested brackets in Visual Studio, it can be hard to figure out which brackets match and which do not. For people with color blindness or other optic maladies, the problem can be even worse. By color-coding bracket pairs, we’re making this much easier. Various IDE’s and editors offer this feature today – usually done ...

When you have multiple instances of Visual Studio open at the same time, it can be tricky to tell them apart. Especially if you’re working on different branches of the same solution, which makes them look almost identical. What if each instance could have a unique color so you could instantly tell them apart? Would you use it? The Peacock ex...

A growing number of Visual Studio customers use ultra-wide monitors today. Ultra-wide means wider than a traditional 16:9 widescreen display – usually 3440x1440 or larger resolution. They seem to be gaining popularity among developers and I’m curious how Visual Studio can use all this extra space. So, I asked people on Twitter to send me screenshot...

It’s now been 25 years since the first release of Visual Studio in 1997 and such a big milestone deserves a proper celebration. The Visual Studio 25th Anniversary Event kicks off at 9 AM Pacific Time on Thursday, March 17, with exclusive content and exciting reveals all day long. During the online event, you’ll see familiar faces from Visual...

In collaboration with the open source community, we’re introducing a new toolkit for writing Visual Studio extensions. Extensions used to be difficult to write, but the new toolkit makes it easier than ever. The toolkit consists of brand-new tooling inside Visual Studio as well as new APIs to code against. It’s all included in the free Extensibilit...

Writing extension for Visual Studio can be a daunting task for even the seasoned developer. Figuring out where to start is a not obvious and the whole process a bit mysterious. At least, that’s what you’ve told over the years from trying to write extensions. That’s why we’re now introducing a new video series to make extension writing easier than e...