Visual Studio Blog

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

PHP in Visual Studio

PHP is one of the most popular programming languages for server-side web development. It's used in many frameworks and CSMs like WordPress, Laravel, Symfony, and others which are behind a sizable chunk of the Internet. Visual Studio is a powerful IDE, but its focus didn’t align with some languages, PHP being one of them. As time ...

Cool features in Visual Studio 2022

A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation at a conference about cool new features in Visual Studio 2022. It was a pre-recorded presentation, so I was able to do final edits to the video before sending it to the conference organizers. The result was a 38-minute-long video highlighting some of my favorite new features, tweaks, and extensions. And ...

Copy with proper indentation

You want to share some code you’ve written with a colleague, so you select it in the editor and hit Ctrl+C to copy it. As you paste it in Outlook/Slack/Teams, you realize that the indentation levels are inconsistent due to your original selection. You must now either go back to Visual Studio and do a box selection and copy that, or manually ...

Comparing files in Visual Studio

As developers, we often need to compare two files to find the differences. Sometimes, even comparing the content of the clipboard with a file on disk. And again, sometimes comparing our local changes to previous versions from our Git commit history. There is no straightforward way in Visual Studio to do those things today, but in this month’...

Now Introducing Arm64 Support for VS Extensions!

Back in June, we announced Arm64 Visual Studio 2022 application, the first version of Visual Studio that natively supports building and debugging Arm64 apps on Arm-based processors.  Now, we’re excited to announce the extensions you write, and use, are supported in Arm64 VS!   Adding Arm64 support to your new or existing extension...

VisualStudio.Extensibility: A New Way to Write Extensions

Last year, we announced the first phase of a new extensibility model for Visual Studio.  This new model will make extensions easier to write and more reliable along with additional benefits such as being able to install these extensions without restarting the IDE.  Now, we’re excited to announce the second phase of the new extensibility ...

Differentiating Visual Studio instances

When you have multiple instances of Visual Studio open at the same time, it can be tricky to tell them apart. Especially if you’re working on different branches of the same solution, which makes them look almost identical. What if each instance could have a unique color so you could instantly tell them apart? Would you use it? (image...

Analysis Services and Reporting Services extensions for Visual Studio 2022 are here!

We’re happy to announce the popular and long-awaited Analysis Services, RDLC Report Designer, and Reporting Services extensions are available for Visual Studio 2022!  Here’s how these Microsoft extensions for SQL Server can further enhance your business intelligence solution development environment. SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) ...