Visual Studio Blog

The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team

Overview of Visual Studio 2017 and Updates for .NET Developers

Visual Studio 2017 first released in March of this year. Since then, there have been five updates with each bringing more improvements and capabilities. Every improvement is geared towards making you more productive and this post aims to give you an overview of the culmination of features to date. Read on to see how you can get started working...

Managing Secrets Securely in the Cloud

You’ve probably heard some version of the story about a developer who mistakenly checked in his AWS S3 key to Github. He pulled the key within 5 minutes but still racked up a multi-thousand dollar bill from bots that crawl open source sites looking for secrets. As developers we all understand and care about keeping dev and production secrets...

Spend more time working on the interesting stuff

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 ...

Keep Your Skills Up to Date: New Training and Azure Resources

Finding better ways to upskill is a consistent topic that comes up when we talk to you about what’s top of mind. It’s no wonder when the one constant in our industry is change with new techniques, frameworks, tools, and languages emerging all the time. Developers by nature are extremely self-reliant when it comes to dealing with this ...

The Latest in Developer Productivity and App Experiences

Whatever the language or platform, developers want the same thing - to create app experiences that are high-quality, intelligent and personalized. Experiences that delight users and keep them engaged. To do that, we need tools that increase our productivity, so that we spend more time on what matters most to our app's success. At Connect...

Run book Run! From physical paper to executable online books

(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

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 ...

Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.5 Preview

Today we are releasing the first preview of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5. You can either download it, or if you already have Preview installed, you’ll receive a notification that the update is available. This latest preview contains new features, improvements to key fundamentals such as performance and productivity, and other enhancements to address customer feedback. Read the feature highlight summary below, and check out the Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5 Preview

Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.4 Released

Yesterday we released updates to several of our products: Visual Studio 2017 version 15.4, support for .NET Standard 2.0 in the Universal Windows Platform, and the release of Visual Studio for Mac version 7.2. This minor update contains new features and performance improvements as well as fixes for bugs reported by you. Some highlights are mentioned below, for the full feature list check out the Visual Studio 2017 version 15.4 Release notes.

7 Hidden Gems in Visual Studio 2017

I’ve been working on developer tooling for over 16 years, and I still love it when I find a new tip or trick that shaves seconds off a repetitive task. The set below are features that I see infrequently used but can save loads of time! Gem #1 - Expression Evaluator Format Specifiers The part of the debugger that processes the language ...