A month ago we launched Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 at our launch event (http://www.visualstudiolaunch.com) in Seattle. At this event and online, we had a number of sessions showing how Visual Studio 2012 helps you build great applications. We are always looking to ensure that our new tools can be adopted by our users, and have invested in area...

A few months ago, Soma announced plans for a Visual Studio Express 2012 edition for Windows Desktop. Today, we are happy to share that this new Express product is available for download. (You can find the system requirements and download details here.) This post is written by Jennifer Leaf, one of the program managers working on the new product. ...

Windows 8 brings a new app lifecycle model, in which Windows Store apps are automatically managed for the user. These apps always feel alive, even though they never run when they’re off the screen. This provides great benefits for power consumption and battery life. Here are a few related blog posts we recommend for background reading on this to...

On August 15th, we announced the release of Visual Studio 2012 to the web! Make sure to visit Somasegar’s Blog for the announcement, and if you haven’t downloaded yet, check out Jason Zander’s Blog for 12 reasons to upgrade. There was a lot of buzz across the blogs, so here’s a rollup of additional posts you might want to read about the release: ...

As mentioned in the previous performance post on Typing and Editing we would follow with a post on the improvements to Visual Studio 2012 from enhancements in the Toolbox. I would like to introduce Duke Kamstra and Chuck England from two teams in Visual Studio to describe to you the work done to improve responsiveness via the Toolbox. Visual Stu...

Microsoft Visual Studio has had a long and successful run over the last decade plus, and much of that success has been through the partnership with our customers along the way. We believe that you can build better products through better conversations, and our feedback channels are intended to help us listen and respond to the things you tell us as...

Samples are the primary way that we as developers learn to develop applications for a new platform. We use samples as a starting point to learn about new APIs, we reference them when we hit bugs in our own code and need a comparison, and we share them for others to learn from our discoveries. If a picture is worth a thousand words then a sample is ...

With Visual Studio 2012, we strive to provide the best development experience across all Microsoft platforms. This includes enabling developers to bring to life the richness of Windows desktop applications - whether you are learning to build your first app or whether you’ve been developing on Microsoft platforms for many years. A few weeks ago, ...

Let’s talk about the all-caps menus. When we shared the RC design preview with you, we expected the uppercase menu would generate mixed feedback and emotions. We had seen similar reactions from early adopters and from our own internal users prior to posting about it. Rest assured that we’ve heard you, and we’ve been thinking thro...

In Soma’s previous blog post, we announced the first CTP of the Roslyn project.   Roslyn is a forward looking project that enables the C# and VB compilers to be used as a service.  Today, as Jason Zander discusses in more detail, we’re excited to announce the second Roslyn CTP – with full support for Visual Studio 2012 RC. You can get the CTP from ...