Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
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...
Visual Studio “15” Preview 2
Last month, we released our first preview of the next version of Visual Studio. After listening to your feedback, we have fixed issues and improved experiences in this preview. Download Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 to get the latest. This is still a Preview and is unsupported, so please refrain from installing it on your production environments. This preview like the previous one, lays groundwork for the next version of Visual Studio. We primarily focused on bug fixes and a few feature updates. New features include; making the account settings dialog more accessible to screen readers, diagnostics improvements to...
14 more reasons to download Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 today
If you haven’t downloaded Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 yet, now is a good time to do so. In the latest KB we have addressed some of the top reported problems around performance and reliability. So far, we’ve made 14 fixes and updates, that address Visual Studio build fail issues, Visual Studio crashes, and improve memory usage by disabling FSD by default. See the full list of fixes at MSDN – Update for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 What do you need to do to get these improvements in Update 2? The current KB3151378 patch (version 14.0.25130.0) will also enable in-product notifications to appear when there are n...
Top New from March 2016
Yes, it might seem a bit odd to have a post with “March” in the title now that it’s already May, but it does take a few weeks for the data to show what you’ve all been reading about lately. So with no further ado, here are those recent highlights! Xamarin included with Visual Studio. As announced at //build 2016 to great applause, Xamarin’s full cross-platform, C#/.NET-based mobile app platform is now included at no extra cost in all editions of Visual Studio. No more licensing! Clearly this has made a difference. Nat Friedman noted during his keynote at Evolve 2016 last week that interest in Xamarin has spike...
Visual Studio TACO Update 9
Update 9 of the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO) is ready for you! You’ll soon see a notification in Visual Studio to install the update or you can download and install it directly, now. If this is the first you’ve heard of TACO, take a moment and learn more about our mobile developer tools for web developers. This release includes all of the goodness of TACO Update 8, which focused on giving you more control of your dev environment and providing better guidance for plugins. Update 9 focuses on two main themes: In this post, I’ll highlight the main changes included in Visual Studio TACO Update...
New and Noteworthy Extensions for Visual Studio – April 2016
In April the community added another 100 new Visual Studio extensions to the Visual Studio Gallery. To help you enjoy this creativity from the community, every month or two I’ll be introducing some of the new extensions that caught my eye. Here are the highlights for this month: Open in Notepad++ by Calvin A. Allen Download Open in Notepad++ from the Visual Studio Gallery This extension adds an option to open a file in Notepad++ to the right-click menu of Solution Explorer. We have previously seen similar extensions like Open in Sublime and Open in Visual Studio Code. Calvin based this extension on the...
News from Xamarin Evolve: What’s next for Visual Studio and Xamarin
Less than a month ago, at //BUILD, we announced the integration of Xamarin technology into our Visual Studio product line, furthering our Any Developer, Any App, Any Platform approach and bringing even more power and productivity to the nearly 13 million devs who have already downloaded Visual Studio 2015 and the 10 million who have downloaded Visual Studio Community 2015. This integration provides Visual Studio users (like you :)) great additional value to create beautiful and highly performant native Android, iOS and Windows apps, at no additional cost. The combination of the existing Microsoft product portfoli...
The Latest of Microsoft Office Developer Tools: Office Add-in Commands and SharePoint 2016 Support
Office’s message at Build was loud and clear: Office is an open market for developers who want to reinvent productivity, backed by a consumer base of 1.2 billion users. Qi Lu welcomed developers to the Office ecosystem in his Build keynote, and showcased new robust extensibility features that enable you to create custom experiences in Office that look and feel native. A new wave of excitement and growth is sweeping through the Office ecosystem, and there is no better time to be an Office developer. And no better tool than Visual Studio to get started! As a Visual Studio user, you can get started right away and...