Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
Productivity in Visual Studio 2017 RC
We know that many developers choose Visual Studio because of its powerful, yet natural, productivity features that help you stay “in the zone”. Visual Studio 2017 RC brings many improvements in this regard, helping you stay even more focused on your program rather than on the tools you use to build it. Download it now to see how you can save time and effort on the tasks that you do day-in, day-out. We’ve focused our improvements in three main areas where we know most developers spend their time: code editing, navigation and debugging. In this post I’ll go into details highlighting features in each area. Code ...
Visual Studio Tools for Unity 3 Preview
Today at Connect() we announced the release of the Visual Studio Tools for Unity 3 Preview. VSTU is Microsoft’s free Visual Studio add-on that enables a rich programming and debugging experience for working with the Unity gaming tools and platform. VSTU 3 Preview is part of the «Game Development with Unity» workload that you can install from the Visual Studio 2017 RC installer. With this workload, Unity developers can install just what they need to write and debug cross-platform Unity games with Visual Studio 2017 RC. VSTU 3 Preview is also available for Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 on the Visual Studio ...
What’s new for iOS and Android developers using JavaScript?
With the release of Visual Studio 2017 RC this week, we’re introducing you to the latest and greatest release of the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO). In this release, we’re tackling the big problems – the issues we know you face every day as mobile developers. They fall into two major themes: Fast, reliable builds When we talk with Cordova developers, by far the most common issues are around environment setup and building applications. This makes sense, because building is what Cordova is all about – i.e. building a native application using the native target platform SDKs. Our data ind...
Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate
Today during the Connect(); 2016 event we announced the availability of the release candidate of the next version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate. Thank you to those who tried out the pre-builds and previews and provided feedback. Your feedback always plays an important role in the successful release of Visual Studio. This release has many productivity features and performance updates as well as improvements to the mobile- and cloud-development experiences. Of course I can’t cover everything in this blog post, so please do take a look at the Visual Studio 2017 Release Notes and Known Issue...
Announcing the new Visual Studio for Mac
At this morning’s Connect(); 2016 keynote, Nat Friedman and James Montemagno introduced Visual Studio for Mac, the newest member of the Visual Studio family.Visual Studio for Mac is a developer environment optimized for building mobile and cloud apps with Xamarin and .NET. It is a one-stop shop for .NET development on the Mac, including Android, iOS, and .NET Core technologies. Sporting a native user interface, Visual Studio for Mac integrates all of the tools you need to create, debug, test, and publish mobile and server applications without compromise, including state of the art APIs and UI designers for Androi...
Connect(); // 2016 starts Nov 16th
As hundreds of people across Microsoft head towards New York City we wanted to take this opportunity to write a short blog post to remind our community that we’re almost ready to unveil Connect(); // 2016, Microsoft’s big fall developer event, streaming live and totally for free from November 16th through the 18th. You might be reading this and asking the question “so why should you watch this?” or “what exactly is the agenda like this year?”, so let us walk you through all the details so you can decide. Day 1: November 16th (6:45am – 1:30pm PST) Keynotes: November 16th we will be live streaming from 9:4...
Extensibility in Visual Studio “15”: Increasing Reliability and Performance
If you’ve been following this blog, you know that in Visual Studio “15” we’ve been focused on making our developer tools easier to install, increasing performance, and enhancing developer productivity. We’ve been doing the same for extensions, and it’s time to talk a bit more about the implications of these changes both on extension authors and on customers who are using extensions. A quick summary of the changes we’re making: The rest of the post goes into more detail on each of these areas. If you’re an extension author, you’ll want to read this post carefully, since we’re asking you to do so...
Answers to your top TACO questions
Last month I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion at the Microsoft Ignite conference where we discussed mobile app development. I spoke about Visual Studio’s Tools for Apache Cordova (a.k.a. “TACO” for short) side-by-side with James Montemagno of Xamarin fame, Ankit Asthana from the Visual Studio C++ team, and Daniel Jacobson from the UWP team. I heard a lot of really good questions from the audience. Some of these questions are so common that I figure many of our Visual Studio blog readers may find them interesting. In this post I’m going to share the answers to our most common TACO questions....
What’s new in Visual Studio “15” Preview 5 for Universal Windows Developers
In Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, we introduced support for building apps that target the Windows Anniversary Update SDK. Visual Studio “15” continues where VS 2015 left off and brings several new experiences and enhancements for UWP developers. We have been focusing on improving three major areas: While you’ll continue to see a steady stream of improvements in upcoming releases of VS “15”, there are several new experiences in this release for you to try and give feedback. UWP tools with the new Visual Studio "15" installer Getting started with tools for UWP development has never been easier or f...