It’s been just 3 weeks since we released Visual Studio 11 Beta, and we’d like to hear what you think! Let us know your impressions by taking the Visual Studio 11 Beta survey.We do these surveys with most of our releases, and they help us gauge how we are doing with core areas such as performance, reliability, and quality. In this survey...

Welcome back to the 3rd and final part of the Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance series. This week’s topic is Debugging. As I mentioned in the 1st post debugging is a key component in your continuous interaction with Visual Studio and we heard from you that the compile, edit and debug cycle had hiccups and was sluggish. I would like to introduce Tim...

Welcome back to part 2 of the Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance series.  This week’s topic is Solution Load.  We received a great deal of feedback from you clearly telling us that it takes too long to get into your code when loading solutions.  I would like to introduce Nathan Halstead, from the Visual Studio Pro Team, whose information below descr...

Following the //Build conference last year I posted “Addressing Visual Studio Performance” to gather your feedback on Visual Studio performance and to discuss with you those areas you felt were important for us to improve. Next, I posted “An update on Visual Studio Performance” about some of the work we are doing and promised you a set of entries a...

Today, we're excited to announce that Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download. Back in September, we announced the release of Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and detailed the simplification efforts we made across the IDE, integration of the best and most popular features from the Productivity Power Tools and effort to improve proj...

UPDATE: We hear you. There’s a lot of excitement about this release and a lot of passion about colors, designs, styles and icons. Know that we are listening to all your comments here, across social media and we are working hard to make Visual Studio 11 a fast, powerful and feature-rich product. Keep the comments coming, both good and bad. We are re...

UPDATE: We hear you. There’s a lot of excitement about this release and a lot of passion about colors, designs, styles and icons. Know that we are listening to all your comments here, across social media and we are working hard to make Visual Studio 11 a fast, powerful and feature-rich product. Keep the comments coming, both good and bad. We are re...

Bring Some Game To Your Code! A software engineer's glory so often goes unnoticed. Attention seems to come either when there are bugs or when the final project ships. But rarely is a developer appreciated for all the nuances and subtleties of a piece of code--and all the heroics it took to write it. With Visual Studio Achievements Beta, your t...

The Microsoft Visual Studio Design Research Team is looking for participants to give us direct feedback on our development tools, languages and libraries!  Opportunities include usability studies of upcoming features, focus groups where we explore new ideas, as well as 1:1 interviews.What do you get out of it?When you are selected to participa...

The Windows Simulator is a tool provided in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview that helps debugging Metro style applications. Its main purpose is to enable debugging when developers want to test how their applications respond to the new Metro style capabilities without having a device that supports those capabilities. It is implemented as a remote ...