Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
Visual Studio 2015 FAQ
Since we released Visual Studio 2015 on July 20th we’ve been busily answering questions on our forums, here on the blog, on Connect, and on StackOverflow. Here are some of the common questions. Install / Setup Licensing / Purchase Tools / Features Install / Setup 1. Why is my setup taking so long / hanging partway through. What’s going on? In VS 2015 you can chose to configure your setup to only install the tools you want, which makes the install lighter and faster. If you chose to do a full installation though, Visual Studio is a pretty big product and ...
Why write Python in Visual Studio?
Recently, Visual Studio 2015 was released with support for Python. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) are available to help throughout Visual Studio in all the places you’d expect, from editing and IntelliSense, to debugging, profiling, and publishing to Azure. You can find all the details and some video walkthroughs, documentation, and other resources on visualstudio.com, and the post announcing Python Tools 2.1 and Python Tools 2.2 beta. In this post I want to talk about some of the reasons to consider using Visual Studio next time you are working in Python. IntelliSense is actually pretty helpful I ...
Roaming Extension Manager: Control and Consistency down to the last Extension
[UPDATED 7/31] On 7/31 we released an update to the extension. This update includes notifications for extensions, and a change in the UI where the status icons (installed / roaming) are on the left. [Original Post] On July 28th, we released Roaming Extension Manager, an extension that will help you better manage your Visual Studio extensions across multiple machines. Hold the applause! For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Roaming Extension Manager “roams” your list of extensions, so now when you are setting up a new development environment or simply trying to push a few extensions from one machi...
Visual Studio Customer Feedback Channels
We’ve shipped Visual Studio 2015 RTM and you have all been a key part of this with your feedback and great ideas, Thank you! But wait, that doesn’t mean your job is over :). We still need to hear from you about what is good, bad, or ugly in VS 2015 so we can know what to do more of, what to fix, and what to avoid. We look at EVERY piece of feedback that you send to us to decide what to fix, what to change, and what we need to do in our next version. If you don’t tell us, we won’t know and we’ll do what we think you want and we aren’t always good mind readers. So what do we wan...
Targeting Windows 10 with your Apache Cordova app
This April, in concert with Windows 10 Technical Preview 2, we debuted support for the Windows 10 platform for Apache Cordova. Now, with the availability of Windows 10, full Windows 10 support is part of the Windows Apache Cordova platform and native to Visual Studio 2015. Apache Cordova allows you to write apps targeting iOS, Android, Windows, and Windows Phone (and other platforms) with a single code base using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Support for the Universal Windows platform now means that from this single code base you can also target the entire family of Windows 10 devices—desktop, phone, ta...
Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0
Last week we announced the release of the Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0. 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. For VSTU 2.0, the team put a strong focus on improving and optimizing the debugging experience. Since we released VSTU 1.9 almost a year ago it has been downloaded over 300,000 times. Over the course of the last year, we shipped two previews of VSTU 2.0: VSTU 2.0 Preview and VSTU 2.0 Preview 2. Each preview allowing us to share new features and bug fixes as soon as they were r...
The Visual Studio Partner Ecosystem
One of the unique values Visual Studio provides is that over and above the built-in features we have a multitude of extensions to address various niche development scenarios. These extensions are provided by our strong partner ecosystem. The Visual Studio Partner Ecosystem is the strongest it has ever been in the history of Visual Studio. This year we are excited to share that over 1100 partners have created tools and extensions that integrate with Visual Studio 2015, Team Foundation Server, and Visual Studio Online. For Visual Studio 2015 RTM release itself we have 84 launch partners that have made new versions ...
Visual Studio 2015 Diagnostics Investments
When we wrapped up the last release of Visual Studio, I wrote a blog post titled: Visual Studio 2013 Diagnostics Investments, which gathered all the links to our blog posts and other content into a single place. It seems fitting to do the same now that VS2015 has RTM’d, and the same intro I wrote last time applies, so I won’t repeat that here. When I think of the Diagnostics Investments we made in this release, I classify them into 4 broad buckets: platform support, addressing customer feedback, catching performance issues early, and historical debugging with IntelliTrace. Platform support Every ti...
Identity Management Features in Visual Studio 2015
In Visual Studio 2015 we have made radical changes to sign in experiences and connecting to your online resources. You can now chose to use a single account across many developer services, or use multiple accounts across Visual Studio. All of this is possible because of the new Visual Studio Account Manager. The account manager makes every sign-in global to the IDE, reducing the number of times Visual Studio prompts for credentials when connecting to different services. The account manager also enables you to switch easily between multiple accounts, so that you no longer have any sign-out-then-sign-in-again flows...