Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
Microsoft Band and Health developer platform
New to Microsoft Band and Health? Let’s start with a short summary. Microsoft Band is Microsoft’s first wearable device that helps you live healthier and be more productive. Powered by Microsoft Health Service and supported by Microsoft Health apps on all mobile platforms, it is a complete solution for fitness and connectivity. At its launch in October last year, we made a commitment to the developer community to make our ecosystem open and accessible on every platform. As a first step in fulfilling that promise, we launched a preview of the Microsoft Band SDK for Windows and Android in February this...
The Glimpse Team Joins Microsoft
Today, when building applications, web developers need to consider more browsers, platforms, devices, and form factors than ever before. Recent hardware advances, from mobile computing, touch interfaces and high resolution displays, to the ever shifting landscape of browser API’s and JavaScript libraries, have elevated the level of discipline required to be successful on the modern web. As such, the maturity of web development tooling has increased to aide developers, but a large gap still remains, and developing for the web platform is not as easy as it should be. It is my belief that Microsoft can make an...
Save the date! Visual Studio 2015 Final Release
The final release of Visual Studio 2015 is coming soon! Mark your calendars for the celebrations on July 20th 2015. This event featuring tools for any developer and any app will start with Soma’s keynote streamed live starting 8:30 am PDT. New this year, you will have the opportunity to see the Visual Studio team creating an end-to-end solution for an open-source project, leveraging the newest tools and technologies. See how they tackle the different problems along the way, and ask them questions directly! We will have live, interactive Q&A sessions with engineering teams. You can also watch over 60...
Share Your Open Source Extension on the Visual Studio Gallery!
In a recent post on Extending Visual Studio 2015 we shared how easy it is to create Visual Studio extensions. We also shared links to our improved docs and to our presence on GitHub. Continuing in this vein of improvements to make it super easy to write and share extensions, I’d like to share the improved integration with GitHub in the Visual Studio Gallery. Today there are thousands of very useful open source extensions in the VS gallery with their code hosted on GitHub. These open source extensions provide a chance for other developers to learn and collaborate, and for the extension authors to get feedba...
Top News from May 2015
Hello everyone! Every month I share some top stories from the previous month. Here’s an overview of some top posts in May. Top Trending Content for May 2015 .NET at Build 2015. On the .NET blog, Richard Lander shared 2 interesting posts. .NET Announcements at Build 2015 is an excellent one-stop shop for everything you need to know about the latest updates in .NET core, .NET Execution Environment (DNX), .NET languages, ASP.NET, Entity framework, and all of the improvements in Visual Studio for .NET. Targeting the .NET framework 4.6 RC has details about the latest version of the .NET Framework and the new A...
JavaScript Editor Improvements in Visual Studio 2015
JavaScript is an important technology for development on many different platforms, including web, mobile app, and server programming. In Visual Studio 2013 we already support IntelliSense, Go to Definition, colorization, and formatting of JavaScript source, along with several other features. We’ve carried these forward into Visual Studio 2015 and we’ve improved the experience for JavaScript developers by focusing on three key areas: Each of these areas was chosen based on feedback we heard on UserVoice, through social media, via the send-a-smile/frown feature in Visual Studio, and from many...
Developing for iOS using the Tools for Apache Cordova
Most developers are already familiar with Xamarin and C++ for iOS development, but Visual Studio 2015 also delivers a quick and easy way for developers to build iOS, Android, and Windows apps using JavaScript. The Tools for Apache Cordova are ideal for projects where speed-to-market, maintainability, and code re-use are paramount. Apache Cordova’s web standards based approach combined with its flexible plugin model allows you to tap into a large and growing client-side web development community. Open source resources are plentiful at all layers of the stack – not just for accessing native APIs via Cordova plugins...
Introducing the Project System Extensibility Preview
[Update 6/4: We've updated this post to clarify the roadmap of this project to become part of the Visual Studio SDK, once it moves past the Preview phase.] We are very pleased and excited to announce the availability of the Project System Extensibility Preview. With it, you can define a new project type and begin writing extensions to customize the user experience or add features in just a few minutes while owning very little code. Gone are the days where you have to create or maintain an entire project system (usually a fork based on MPFproj) often containing well over 100K lines of code. Instead, you'll be bui...
Tools for Apache Cordova – Samples and Docs
Open source code is the norm for so many developers these days, and unsurprisingly, so is open documentation. From Azure to TypeScript, public repositories have become a go-to place for sharing samples, tutorials, and “tips and tricks” so that everyone can learn and contribute together as a community. So beginning today, we’re joining the party, starting with our Cordova docs. You can find Cordova samples and tutorials and “tips and tricks” in our GitHub repo. These assets won’t replace the Cordova documentation already found on MSDN. Instead, they’ll complement our ex...