Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Anatomy of a Low Impact Visual Studio Install
At //build 2016, Microsoft announced the first public preview of a quick way to get Visual Studio “15” Preview. We’ve previously shared posts about what we’re building and why: In building faster ways of getting VS, we needed to reduce the size of the minimum product, change a bit of the way the IDE itself ran, change the way components are installed on your computer, and reduce the way components can impact your system. In this article, I will share a little about what it took to make this come together. The details are not so much as to communicate final engineering changes, but to share a bit about how w...
Anatomy of a Low Impact Visual Studio Install
In building faster ways of getting VS, we needed to reduce the size of the minimum product, change a bit of the way the IDE itself ran, change the way components are installed on your computer, and reduce the way components can impact your system. In this article, I will share a little about what it took to make this come together.
A Side-by-Side Comparison of Mobile-App Development Solutions
The world of mobile app development has been bursting at the seams with opportunities these last few years, as companies look for the next horizon of productivity gains and new revenue streams to fuel their growth. But along with the opportunities tied to each mobile platform comes the responsibility of ensuring a secure and seamless experience for the end user. This begs the question: How can companies build on multiple platforms, while still being responsive to market opportunities? The answer is cross-platform app development. As the name implies, cross-platform app development tools make it easy for develope...
Improving the C++ Developer Experience in Visual Studio 2015
Harness the speed, performance and portability of modern C++ with the power of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. This release includes remote debugging on Linux devices, additional support for targeting Android and iOS (and Windows), a state of the art C++ coding experience, faster builds, support for modern C++ and all the power of the Visual Studio. The release corresponded with Build 2016. Build 2016 For those who missed sessions online or at the event (or want to relive the moment), you can binge-watch over on Channel 9. C++ developers might want to include these gems: C++ Developer Experience Impro...
Open Any Folder with Visual Studio “15” Preview
For developers to be truly productive in Visual Studio their code needs to be organized into Solutions and projects, right? For a long time, that was a core expectation of how Visual Studio works. Unfortunately, this requirement is a bit of a burden for those of you working across multiple tools and platforms. Sometimes Solutions make a lot of sense, sometimes they don’t – even for languages that Visual Studio has great support for. Many developers start a project by searching GitHub to see what problems other developers have already solved that might be similar to the new project they’re working on. Unfortunate...
What’s new in VS 2015 Update 2 for Universal Windows developers
At //BUILD/, we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 that includes a significant update to the tools for building Universal Windows apps. These tools now support building apps for many new classes of Windows 10 devices such XBOX, HoloLens, and Surface Hub (in addition to Phone, PC, and IOT). Today, we are releasing yet another update to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) tools that includes our most significant update to .NET since the first release of these tools. You can install the latest tools by running Visual Studio 2015 setup and selecting the “Tools (1.3.1) and Windows 10 SDK (10586...
What’s new in VS 2015 Update 2 for Universal Windows developers
At //BUILD/, we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 that includes a significant update to the tools for building Universal Windows apps. These tools now support building apps for many new classes of Windows 10 devices such XBOX, HoloLens, and Surface Hub (in addition to Phone, PC, and IOT). Today, we are releasing yet another update to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) tools that includes our most significant update to .NET since the first release of these tools. You can install the latest tools by running Visual Studio 2015 setup and selecting the “Tools (1.3.1) and Windows 10 SDK (10586...
Previewing Salsa – the New JavaScript Language Service in Visual Studio “15”
The new JavaScript language service, codenamed "Salsa", is now available in Visual Studio "15" Preview. Language services are responsible for providing syntax highlighting, completion lists, signature help, and other tooling features for a specific language inside the IDE. Salsa delivers many improvements over the existing JavaScript language service such as improved module support, full ES6/ES7 syntax coverage, and JSX support. Why a new language service? Until now, JavaScript editing in Visual Studio used an execution model for the language service. Essentially, as you typed, a JavaScript engine constantly exec...
New and Noteworthy Extensions for Visual Studio – March 2016
It was great to see the excitement around last month’s post and I heard from many of you that you have discovered some new extensions. March has been another great month for the Visual Studio ecosystem. We added over 100 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: Also if you missed our earlier post, we recently open sourced the Productivity Power Tools. Besides being a great tool for developers, they make great samples for real...