Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Visual Studio 2026 is here: faster, smarter, and a hit with early adopters
Dear developers, We’re thrilled to announce that Visual Studio 2026 is now generally available! This is a moment we’ve built side by side with you. Your feed...
Latest posts
Office 365 Client APIs for Hybrid Mobile Apps
The Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova enable developers to build mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows using web standards technologies. When used with the Office 365 API Tools for Visual Studio, developers can access Office 365 APIs from their hybrid mobile applications to access to the user’s calendar, contacts, mail, and files from their Office 365 account to easily create a richer, more connected experience. Both the Tools for Apache Cordova and the Office 365 API Tools are extensions for Visual Studio 2013. Building a hybrid mobile app that queries data from a REST service can be hard: you’ll nee...
iOS Build & Debugging with the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova
The Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova enables developers to easily build a mobile app that targets iOS, Android, and Windows with web standards technologies. At the Connect() event in mid-November, we added iOS debugging to the existing support for Windows and Android (for both Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and Visual Studio 2015 Preview). With the addition of iOS debugging support, the tools for Cordova enable you to stay in Visual Studio for the majority of your development experience. The Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova uses a remote agent running on OSX to build, simulate, run, and debug an iOS v...
Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview
Two weeks ago during the Connect() event we announced the release of the Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview. 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. The support for Visual Studio 2015 Preview is one of VSTU 2.0 Preview’s main features, but VSTU works wonderfully with Visual Studio 2013 Community as well. Indies, hobbyists and students alike can now use Visual Studio with full extension support, and therefore VSTU to get the best Unity scripting experience -- for free! VSTU is available...
Connecting to Cloud Services
Modern applications often rely on services for analytics, data storage and retrieval, and customer information. It’s increasingly common to see applications that blend together services such as Salesforce with Azure Storage and a couple of analytics services such as Application Insights or Flurry. While these services provide usable REST APIs and client libraries, connecting to them remains a manual process. Visual Studio 2013 added a Connected Services dialog that started to automate this manual process and in Visual Studio 2015 Preview, we’re going further: we’ve added support for more services such as Azure...
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...