Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Agent mode is now generally available with MCP support
Copilot agent mode is the next evolution in AI-assisted development—and it's now generally available in the Visual Studio June update. Agent mode turns GitHu...
Latest posts
Improving the Visual Studio Account Management Experience
Anyone who has built an application in Visual Studio that uses several services (e.g. roaming Visual Studio settings, accessing Azure services in Server Explorer, or using Windows Store) has probably experienced what we’ve come to call “sign-in Whack-A-Mole,” with prompts popping up when you least expect them to. In Visual Studio 2015 we introduced an account manager to reduce how often Visual Studio needs to prompt for credentials and to make it easier for you to switch among different user accounts within the IDE. You’ll see the account manager utilized in various places inside the Visual Studio 2015 user in...
Blend for Visual Studio 2015 Preview
Yesterday we released a preview of Visual Studio 2015, and as part of that we are introducing a new Blend experience. We redesigned Blend for Visual Studio 2015 to provide you with a great user interface development experience for creating beautiful XAML apps. Blend has a sleek new look consistent with Visual Studio for improved workflow between the two products. We leveraged Visual Studio technologies to provide you with a better solution explorer and source control support in Blend. In addition, XAML IntelliSense and basic debugging capabilities are also now available. Some highlights of this new release incl...
Tools for Apache Cordova Update: iOS Debugging & Windows 8.1 Support
At Visual Studio Connect(); we released an update to the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova. These tools allow you to use Visual Studio to build Apache Cordova-based apps written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. What makes these apps special is that they allow you to marry the familiarity of coding using web technologies with the ability to share nearly 100% of their code across the Android, iOS, and Windows platforms. Under the covers, the projects you create rely on Apache Cordova for the cross-platform functionality. Above the covers, you have all of the great functionality Visual Studio provides for desig...
The C# and Visual Basic Code-Focused IDE Experience
The new C# and Visual Basic code-focused IDE experience in the Visual Studio 2015 Preview is significantly improved over the experience in Visual Studio 2013 and I’m excited to share some highlights with you. We’ll look at a few key areas: Many of the new and refreshed features that I describe below come to us by way of the .NET Compiler Platform (formerly codenamed “Roslyn”), our rebuild of the C# and Visual Basic compilers and IDE experiences. Refreshed Core IDE Experiences The C# and Visual Basic IDEs are made up of dozens of features that developers use every day, such as ...
Visual Studio 2015 Preview, Visual Studio Community 2013, Visual Studio 2013 Update 4, and More
[UPDATED 8/5] Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013 Update 5, and .NET 4.6 were released on 7/20/2015. Check out this post announcing VS 2015 and VS 2013 Update 5 and this one announcing .NET framework 4.6. [UPDATE: 11/13] We have updated this post with links to detail blog posts on updated tooling for Apache Cordova and Blend for Visual Studio 2015. Look for the [UPDATE] tag to find these links. Original post: This is a big day with a lot of releases going out and so this post is longer than normal. I’ll briefly touch on some of today’s releases and point you to other locations with more details. We...
Save the date! Connect(“November 12 & 13”); is almost here
Don’t miss the cloud-first, mobile-first, code-first virtual event for developers, streaming live starting November 12th! Join us on Day 1, November 12th and watch keynotes from Scott Guthrie, S. Somasegar, Brian Harry, and Scott Hanselman where they will share news on innovative new products and services that build on your existing skills. Come back on Day 2, November 13th, to interact with engineering team in live sessions direct from Redmond, Washington. Gain further insight about the newest tools, frameworks, and services – ask questions and learn right from the engineers who built your favorite ...
Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 RC now Available
Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 RC is now available to download. This release has lots of small features and fixes for ASP.NET and web platform, Team Foundation Server, Visual C++, JavaScript Editor, Testing Tools, and some other areas. Specifically for updates to the web development tools checkout this new features announcement on .NET web development and tools blog. The release notes have the complete list of features and fixes included in this release. As always, please give us your feedback, suggestions, thoughts, and ideas on our UserVoice site, through the in-product Send-a-Smile and Send-a-Frown UI, or f...
Python Tools 2.1 for Visual Studio
The final release of Python Tools 2.1 for Visual Studio (PTVS) is available for download. PTVS is available for Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2012, and Visual Studio 2013. In addition to the other features listed below, PTVS 2.1 supports the free Visual Studio Express for Web and Express for Windows Desktop editions as well as Visual Studio Professional and higher. Python has been a widely used programming language across the industry for more than two decades. We've provided great support for Python in Azure for some time. And in Visual Studio, we've been developing the Python Tools for Visual Studio for th...
Mobile Apps for Web Developers
The path of a mobile app developer often begins with a choice: develop for iOS, Android or Windows? It’s a choice that instantly diminishes the size of your potential audience, but developers often hold their nose and reluctantly make a decision. Those who need to reach all three app stores, choose to rewrite the application for each platform. Visual Studio enables you to have maximum reach while achieving significant code re-use. With Xamarin, C# developers can share business logic across iOS, Android, and Windows applications. With Apache Cordova, web developers can achieve maximal code re-use by building cr...