Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
How Visual Studio gives Halfbrick ninja powers
For this post we welcome Nicholas Cornelius and Miguel Pastor from Halfbrick as guest authors on the Visual Studio Blog. Halfbrick games, including Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, are released on multi platforms. To minimize per-platform overhead, our games are written primarily in C++ with only small portions of platform-specific code written in Java or Objective-C for Android and iOS, respectively. [Note: one can use 100% C++ on the Windows platform because it’s one of the supported languages for native app development, alongside C#, Visual Basic, and JavaScript—Ed.] For us, it’s hugely imp...
Announcing Tools for Apache Cordova (aka TACO) v1.0.0
We are excited to announce the first official (aka 1.0.0) release of the TACO CLI today! Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO, for short) provides number of utilities for Mac and Windows users to develop with a set of platforms and plugins validated by our Visual Studio product team. Developers can also install the native Android and iOS (Mac-only) SDKs and build tools & also connect to the Mac remote build server straight from the command line on their Windows and Linux machines. And to top it off, our TACO CLI is 100% Cordova CLI compatible. So if you know how to use Cordova CLI, you already know how to use us! A...
IntelliTest for .NET – Test More with Less (effort)
Writing a suit of unit tests that exhaustively exercise and validate the logic of the code under test is not easy. It can even be considered too expensive to do at all. Fortunately, the IntelliTest feature shipping in the Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise Edition addresses both concerns: it helps you achieve high code coverage at a fraction of the cost. When you run IntelliTest on your .NET code, it generates test cases by dynamically analyzing the code under test as it is running on the CLR. For every statement in the code, it crafts an input that will reach that statement, doing a case analysis for every condition...
Introducing U-SQL – A Language that makes Big Data Processing Easy
Microsoft announced the new Azure Data Lake services for analytics in the cloud that includes a hyper-scale repository, a new analytics service built on YARN that allows data developers and data scientists to analyze all data, and HDInsight, a fully managed Hadoop, Spark, Storm and HBase service. Azure Data Lake Analytics includes U-SQL, a language that unifies the benefits of SQL with the expressive power of your own code. U-SQL’s scalable distributed query capability enables you to efficiently analyze data in the store and across relational stores such as Azure SQL Database. In this blog post I will outli...
A Summer of ASP.NET: Catching up with .NET Web Developments
Summer 2015 has come and gone (in the northern hemisphere at least!), and four releases of ASP.NET have hit the internet in that time. With the Visual Studio 2015 release in July the team released ASP.NET 4.6, a major update for our ASP.NET frameworks and tooling. Additionally, ASP.NET 5 beta 5 was released with Visual Studio 2015 so that developers could start to explore the new development framework. With several updates to ASP.NET 5 since that date, and the introduction of the new ASP.NET web hooks tools, there are many new features and capabilities to explore. In this post, we’ll focus on the newest fea...
Survey: Are you using the Tools for Apache Cordova?
In July, we released the first version of our Tools for Apache Cordova. Since then we’ve been busy improving the tools, focusing on issues reported by our users. We’ve also talked with many, many developers about these tools and Cordova development in general, to see how we can make the mobile development world a little bit better for you. Thanks to everyone who’s talked with us in email, over the phone, or online in the past couple months. If we haven’t talked to you yet, we’d like to – and here’s your opportunity to tell us who you are and how you’re using the too...
WinTools 1.1, TypeScript 1.6 RTM, and Tools for Apache Cordova Updates
We’ve just released updates to several tools, along with something new for developers working with the Apache Cordova CLI. Tools for Universal Windows apps (v1.1). This update addresses a number of key issues reported by you in Visual Studio 2015 RTM including several .NET Native fixes, an updated NuGet release (v3.2), and fixes related to the XAML designer, unit testing and the debugger. You can build and submit apps to the Universal Windows Store using these tools right away. For a more detailed list of changes in this release, see the Release Notes . To update to Visual Studio Tools for Universal Window...
Top News for August 2015
Hello everyone! Every month we share some top stories from the previous month, and here’s our round-up for August. DevOps tops the list this month! Brian Harry leads the way with his announcement on Visual Studio Online’s September pricing and licensing changes (short read: a new less expensive, tiered pricing model went into effect September 1st) , along with a refresh of the Visual Studio Online Features Timeline and his Visual Studio Online/TFS Feature timeline—the UserVoice version post. Jeremy Epling also shared Git Experiences Futures, which includes pull requests in Visual Studio, easier...
Unity 5.2 and Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.1
A few months back we announced a partnership with Unity. This makes it easier for game developers to use the rich capabilities of the Visual Studio IDE for building Unity games and to discover the tools for Unity from within Visual Studio. If you don’t already know about the Visual Studio Tools for Unity, check out the Visual Studio Tools for Unity page on visualstudio.com. With the release of Unity 5.2 (Unity's blog post announcing Unity 5.2) and Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.1 today, we’re really excited to share with you some of the results of this partnership. Visual Studio is the new default Unity scri...