Visual Studio Blog

Visual Studio has been around since 1997 when it first released many of its programming tools in a bundle. Back then it came in 2 editions - Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Enterprise. Since then the family has expanded to include many more products, tools, and services.

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Spend more time working on the interesting stuff

November 16th, 2017
There’s a reason that each day thousands of developers take advantage of the rich set of extensions offered by our growing family of VS and VSTS Partners and the broader VS community. Collectively these offerings can save you and your team time in many different ways, from helping find bugs faster, to making it easier to work with data, to ...

Run book Run! From physical paper to executable online books

October 26th, 2017
(image) Have you ever wanted to run the code samples while reading a book? Without having to first download the sample code, its runtime, and configure your environment so that everything is setup the way you need it? What if you could be reading a book, and immediately execute (and change!) the code without needing to install anything on your...

Webinar: Level-up Your Unity Games with Visual Studio, C#, and Azure Easy Tables

October 24th, 2017
Join David Antognoli on Tuesday, November 7th at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC for our “Build Better Games with Unity and Microsoft Azure” webinar. He'll show you how to add an Azure cloud data store to your Unity games and create more immersive player experiences. With Visual Studio Tools for Unity, you get the best of both worlds. You ...

Step-back while debugging with IntelliTrace

October 12th, 2017
Have you ever stepped while debugging, realized that you’ve taken one step too far, and wished you could step back? Or, while stepping, saw a variable change in an unexpected way, and wish you could go back a step and see what its value was before? Now you can, all without having to restart debugging to recreate the state again! In Visual...

Visual Studio and Xamarin take iOS support to 11

September 26th, 2017
With the first wave of new iPhone 8 devices landing in people's hands, and the installed base of iOS 11 users growing rapidly, it's an exciting time to build apps for iPhone and iPad, as well as macOS and the new 4k Apple TVs and Cellular Apple Watches. Of course, Visual Studio and Xamarin are ready to enable you as .NET developers to create ...

Source Control Showcase: Integrating Subversion and Perforce into Visual Studio 2017

September 21st, 2017
Last year, we highlighted the new extensibility points for our source control providers. These hooks allowed them to take advantage of our start page and status bar to provide their users a more integrated experience in Visual Studio. Two of our partners, VisualSVN and Perforce, have taken advantage of this opportunity and we’re excited to ...

Debug live apps in Azure with the Snappoints and Logpoints preview

September 13th, 2017
At Build, we introduced the Snapshot Debugger: a new tool that enables you to debug production environments in Azure with minimal impact. The Snapshot Debugger enables you to get to the root cause of the “but it worked locally!” production issues with ease. We previously released functionality to automatically capture snapshots when your ...

A significant update to the XAML Designer

September 11th, 2017
The XAML designers in Visual Studio and Blend have been powerful tools for developers and designers alike to build beautiful user experiences for Windows applications. Initially designed for WPF development in 2007, we have made significant changes to support a wide variety of XAML platforms over the last decade. We’ve also added new ...

New Xamarin University Webinar: Exploring UrhoSharp 3D with Xamarin Workbooks

September 11th, 2017
Join me on Thursday, September 21 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC for my “Exploring UrhoSharp 3D with Xamarin Workbooks” webinar, where I’ll combine my love of graphics programming with my passion for helping developers build better apps. Whether you’re just getting started or an experienced developer, you’ll learn how to use your ....

New Xamarin University Webinar: Take your desktop .NET skills mobile

August 16th, 2017
We are looking to improve your experience on the Visual Studio Blog. It would be very helpful if you could share your feedback via this short survey that should take less than 2 minutes. Thanks! Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin gives you everything you need to build amazing native mobile apps for Android, iOS, and UWP – and Xamarin ...