Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Visual Studio 2026 is here: faster, smarter, and a hit with early adopters
Dear developers, We’re thrilled to announce that Visual Studio 2026 is now generally available! This is a moment we’ve built side by side with you. Your feed...
Latest posts
Improved Productivity with new Version Control Features in Visual Studio 2015
Whether you’re working on a side project with some friends or developing enterprise software, odds are you’re using source control. With the advent of open source software and collaboration, source control is an increasingly important part of the developer workflow. We’ve spent the last two updates working to improve the source control experience within Visual Studio and we’re not done yet! We strive to accommodate all the various source control providers our users use and work to maintain extensible features. To this end, we’ve created a few new additions that should help developers be more productive when wo...
New Pluralsight Courses for Visual Studio Subscribers Coming in July 2016
We’re refreshing the Pluralsight course list for Visual Studio subscribers on July 1, 2016! As you may know, Pluralsight is a benefit included with your Visual Studio (MSDN) Subscription. They are a global leader in high-quality online training for developers. Pluralsight provides on-demand access to rich collection of expert-led courses, training exercises, and more. For Visual Studio subscribers, we periodically update the course selection based on subscriber demand to bring you fresh and relevant courses on a wide range of subjects from Azure to Machine Learning. This means that some of the current courses ...
Visual Studio TACO Update 10
We are proud to present Update 10 of the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO). You can look forward to installing it with Update 3 of Visual Studio 2015, or download and install it directly now. If this is the first time you’ve heard of TACO, try our beginner’s guide and build your first app for Android, iOS and Windows, with JavaScript! In Update 10, we delivered two major areas of upgrade: For more details, see our Update 10 release notes. More plugins, better plugins Part of what makes Cordova a great platform for mobile app development is its ecosystem of over 1,200 plugins that en...
Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 RC
Today we are sharing Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 RC. This release candidate primarily focuses on stability, performance, and bug fixes, but we also have some feature updates. I’ll share highlights in the rest of this post. Tools for Apache Cordova. This update includes TACO Update 9 and TACO Update 10, which adds plugins for Intune, Azure engagement, security, and SQLite storage, as well as the ability to add plugins from the config designer either by npm package name or ID. It also includes support for Cordova 6.1.1. Application Insights and HockeyApp. Developer Analytics Tools v7.0.1 adds has diagnostics tool...
dotnetConf is back! Free live streaming developer event – June 7th-9th 2016
.NET plays an important role in the lives of many Visual Studio developers, I for one have worked on many ASP.NET, WPF Desktop and other back-end .NET services over the years in my career and therefore its really exciting for me to be part of the team to bring you yet another dotnetConf, back again and streaming live this week (and for free, with no need to register)! Watch Live June 7th– 9th 2016, or catch-up on-demand via Channel 9 archive You can watch the live stream on Channel 9 for three days, June 7th-9th 2016 by simply visiting the Channel 9 website between 8:30am PDT (keynotes) and 4pm PDT each day. I...
dotnetConf is back! Free live streaming developer event – June 7th-9th 2016
.NET plays an important role in the lives of many Visual Studio developers, I for one have worked on many ASP.NET, WPF Desktop and other back-end .NET services over the years in my career and therefore its really exciting for me to be part of the team to bring you yet another dotnetConf, back again and streaming live this week (and for free, with no need to register)! Watch Live June 7th– 9th 2016, or catch-up on-demand via Channel 9 archive You can watch the live stream on Channel 9 for three days, June 7th-9th 2016 by simply visiting the Channel 9 website between 8:30am PDT (keynotes) and 4pm PDT each day. I...
Announcing the new Desktop to UWP Packaging Project for Visual Studio “15”
At the Build 2016 conference, we released the Desktop App Converter which enables you to bring your existing desktop applications to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). With the Desktop App Converter, a number of important improvements are being made to the Windows platform for all developers. First, you can convert existing Windows desktop apps or games to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) packages so your users will be able to install them easily and experience seamless updates. Once converted to the UWP application model, the desktop app has access to new UWP APIs which previously were inaccessible to deskto...
Announcing Updated Web Development Tools for ASP.NET Core RC2
We are pleased to announce the ASP.NET Core Tooling Preview release to support the .NET Core RC2 and ASP.NET Core RC2 release. Get the new version of the framework and Visual Studio 2015 support now at: http://dot.net Tooling Preview, What’s That? With this release, we’re splitting the delivery of the Visual Studio tools from the ASP.NET Core and .NET Core runtime and libraries. Those frameworks are almost ready for RTM, and we are working on delivering the advanced capabilities for building and managing applications built with these new tools. A full description of this release schedule change is available on th...
Macros extension: VS 2015 support and open-sourced
Macros have always been popular, first as part of the product, and now as an extension. In response to your feedback we have upgraded the Macros for Visual Studio 2013 extension to be compatible with Visual Studio 2015. You can download the upgraded extension from the Visual Studio Gallery. But wait, there's more! As part of our commitment to partnering with our developer community, we have open-sourced the code. So now you can view the code, make your own improvements, and contribute to the project for future releases. The open source project is available on GitHub under the MIT license. The Macros extension c...