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 the be...
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 fix the...
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’s exper...
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 Making ...
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 model, now ...
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? The Peacock ex...
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) The Microso...
The recent Visual Studio 2022 Launch event was jam-packed with content, and that included updates on extensibility! Check out the VS 2022 Launch videos on extensibility that you may have missed!
We are working on exciting, major updates to how extensions are written and used in Visual Studio, but it’s a long road to completing them.  In the meantime, we’d love your ideas on what we can do in the more immediate future to improve how you use or write extensions.
In collaboration with the open source community, we’re introducing a new toolkit for writing Visual Studio extensions. Extensions used to be difficult to write, but the new toolkit makes it easier than ever. The toolkit consists of brand-new tooling inside Visual Studio as well as new APIs to code against. It’s all included in the free Extensibilit...
