Visual Studio’s performance continues to be a hot topic for a lot of customers. We hear you and are investing to improve the performance of the product in those areas that are important to you. There are two key parts to our approach: Collecting Customer Feedback We are working to make your feedback less ad hoc and give you a single p...

At the end of April, we released a telemetry system to monitor and report the performance issues that our customers face during their everyday use of the product. To start off, I would like to thank everyone who installed Visual Studio PerfWatson! These reports have provided valuable insight into where you are encountering issues, and have helped u...

By Alice LeeDeveloping a full-fledged Windows Phone app in one week – that’s pretty ambitious, right?Last week, at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE)’s weekly Summer Cyber Camp, a team of talented high and middle school students set out to do just that. I followed them for one week, documenting the process of creating ...

By Sam Zaiss Update: We're happy to set anyone up with the new reduced toolbar set, whether you are in the US or not. Unfortunately the rule about the Microsoft gratuity is strict, but if you're willing, we'd still love to get your feedback. Please send mail to VSToolbarFeedback@microsoft.com if you're interested. Update 2: Thanks everyone fo...

In case you missed it, last week at TechEd 2011 in Atlanta, GA, I gave conference attendees a first look at some of the new IDE features and performance improvements we’re working on for the next version of Visual Studio.  Channel9 has posted the session (along with all the other TechEd sessions) so everyone else can now watch the presen...

The debut episode of the Visual Studio Toolbox, a new Channel 9 series focused on Visual Studio tips and tricks, is now live!  In the first episode, Robert Green walks through the features of the Solution Navigator tool window included in the Productivity Power Tools, showing you how to efficiently navigate your code.  Check it out and le...

By Selma IkizWould you like Visual Studio 2010 to be even faster? Would you like any performance issue you see to be  reported automatically without any hassle? Well now you can, with the new Visual Studio PerfWatson extension! Install this extension and help us deliver a faster Visual Studio experience.We’re constantly working to improv...

By Robin Reynolds-Haertle This morning, we released an updated version of the Visual Studio Async CTP (SP1 Refresh) that’s compatible with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and Windows Phone 7! What Is the Visual Studio Async CTP (SP1 Refresh)? The Async CTP previews a language feature that is in the next version of Visual Basic and C#. By using this fe...

“Where can I find a list of patches/QFEs/hotfixes for Visual Studio?”  This question appears quite frequently in blog comments and it wasn’t until recently that I found a web page that lists all the publically released patches for Visual Studio. http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/DownloadsThe majority of the patches fi...

By Jack Hu As the word “code-first” implies, the EF 4.1 offers a code centric data programming paradigm. From a coder’s point of view, it requires little effort to map a very clean object model to a database. This style of programming is idea for explorative, bottom-up kind fsharp programmers. Since EF 4 CTP4 release, there have already been man...