Visual Studio Blog

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

Learn to write Visual Studio extensions

Writing extension for Visual Studio can be a daunting task for even the seasoned developer. Figuring out where to start is a not obvious and the whole process a bit mysterious. At least, that’s what you’ve told over the years from trying to write extensions. That’s why we’re now introducing a new video series to make extension writing ...

Join us November 8 for the Launch of Visual Studio 2022

On behalf of our entire team, I’m excited to announce the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2022 on November 8, and the immediate availability of the Visual Studio 2022 Release Candidate (RC) and Preview 5. We invite you to explore the latest capabilities of Visual Studio 2022 at our virtual launch event on November 8. Throughout the day, ...

Case Study: Using Visual Studio Profiler to reduce memory allocations in the Windows Terminal console host startup path

Setting The Stage Around the holidays of 2020 it was a bit quieter, and I decided it might be a great time to go investigate how the Visual Studio profiling tools worked. I have been a long-time user of the Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA), which is a great tool for doing systems-level performance analysis. It is, however, quite complex and...

Bring VS Code themes to Visual Studio 2022!

We want developers to have the flexibility to personalize their Visual Studio IDE to fit their individual preferences, and themes are an important component for achieving this goal. We’ve been testing out a Theme Converter that helps theme authors convert their Visual Studio Code themes to work in VS. Last week, we shared a collection of new...

Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 1 is now available!

Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 1 is now available! This is the first public release of our .NET IDE with a refreshed, fully native macOS UI; we’d love for you to download it, try it out, and share your feedback to help us shape the next major release of Visual Studio for Mac. We owe a huge THANK YOU to our community of private preview...

Avoiding Memory Leaks in Visual Studio Editor Extensions

Visual Studio extenders make VS even better by augmenting it with specialized tools, new languages, and workflows. As a Visual Studio extender, you can ensure your extension’s customers have the most performant, reliable experience possible by avoiding common sources of memory leaks, described within this blog post. Background In the early...

We want to make Help all you need

On the Visual Studio team, we aspire to deliver higher satisfaction across all areas of Visual Studio with greater awareness, connectivity, and productivity. With this in mind, we’ve been investigating the age-old “Help Menu”. This is just the start of a series of experiments we’re trying, and we want your (ahem) help to...

Introducing Collection of New Visual Studio Themes!

We are on a journey to make Visual Studio more flexible than ever, so that you can make the IDE work just the way you like it! One of our key focus areas for Visual Studio 2022 is to build a personal, flexible IDE that you can make your own. We’ve teamed up with theme authors from the community to test a new tool that converts VS Code themes...

Discover quick actions for common tasks as you type, with IntelliCode

Have you ever found yourself wishing there was a built-in tool to accomplish a common task? You could not find the tool and started the work manually. Only after you have started the work, you discover there was a quick action to do the task. IntelliCode can now spot when you're performing a common task and recommend the right quick action...