Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Featured posts
GitHub Copilot Free is here in Visual Studio
If you haven’t already heard, GitHub just announced Copilot Free! And great news: you can already start using Copilot Free right now in Visual Studio. It's avai...
Latest posts
The Story of Synchronized Settings
As you may have read in our post about signing into Visual Studio 2013, one benefit of signing in is the ability to roam your product’s settings across machines. In this post I’ll tell you more about the Synchronized Settings feature. When looking at feedback from customers or requests for new features that enhance productivity, a few requests easily surfaced right to the top. Everyone wanted their Visual Studio IDE installed in minutes, set up in seconds, and ready to use in a blink! This request wasn’t just about a faster install & setup process but begged us to broaden the scope of user convenience when...
Visual Studio Performance – Providing Feedback
With VS 2013 Preview now available for download, we’re excited to share how we’ve been using the feedback and data you’ve shared with us to drive performance improvements to Visual Studio. In this first post, we’ll walk through how we’re prioritizing and scheduling performance investments based on your feedback, and outline the best ways for you to provide additional feedback on performance. We’ll also highlight a few product improvements available for you to try out today. Over the next few weeks, we’ll follow-up with additional blog posts that walk through the details on how we’ve evolved our performance te...
Welcome. Sign in to Visual Studio.
Applications today are leveraging the cloud to deliver personalized experiences and offer new capabilities. So it’s no surprise the tool used to build those applications is also putting the connected developer at the center of the IDE. In Visual Studio 2012, a few features already offered connected experiences that brought online services to specific features in Visual Studio. Team Explorer was one of the first by connecting developers to team development and collaboration tools in the cloud through Team Foundation Services online. Windows Store has integration into the Windows Store projects allowing you ...
What’s new in Visual Studio 2013 Preview for authoring Windows Store XAML apps
Today at BUILD we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 and Blend that brings forward significant advances for authoring XAML-based Windows Store apps for Windows 8.1. This post describes some of the new experiences we are excited to bring to you. In follow up posts, we will describe each of these experiences in greater detail – so stay tuned. Everything we’ll tell you about today is only available for Windows Store apps with Visual Studio 2013. To try these exciting new capabilities, you’ll need to either re-target your existing Windows 8 app (retargeting guidance here), or create a...
Designing the Visual Studio 2013 User Experience
As we were beginning the development of Visual Studio 2012, the user experience teams from across Microsoft worked together to align the design of our products and services around a set of core company-wide design principles that each product and service applied to their specific domain. Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, Office 2013, and Visual Studio 2012 were the first wave of releases to reflect these shared principles in their new designs. Having a more unified and consistent experience is growing in importance as we increasingly interconnect the new device platforms, tools, and services we are introducing this ye...
Visual Studio 2013 Preview Available Now!
Today in the keynote at BUILD we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Preview that can be downloaded here. Make sure to visit Somasegar's blog for a look at what's new in this release of Visual Studio and you can also find additional resources on getting started with Visual Studio 2013 Preview, on MSDN. Windows 8.1 Preview can be downloaded at http://preview.windows.com/. To learn more about what's new in this release of windows check out the Windows 8.1 Preview Announcement. Since we shipped Visual Studio 2012 last year, we have released three Visual Studio Updates that address key customer fee...
Announcing availability of ISOs for Visual Studio Updates
Last month, we shipped Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2). We’re continuing to see good uptake of the Update releases, with the majority of Visual Studio 2012 users now running on VS Update. We’re also hearing positive feedback on the VS Update cadence, and the ongoing improvements that it brings to Visual Studio customers. Many customers have been installing Visual Studio Updates from the “toast” pop-up notification or from the Extensions and Updates dialog. This continues to be the simplest option. The installer downloads only the components you need (based on your current VS installed configuration), an...
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 is here
We’re excited to announce that today, Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2) is now available for download. For an overview of the five areas of investments in VS2012.2 that we made across agile planning, quality enablement, Windows Store development, line-of-business development, and the general developer experience, please visit Soma’s blog. In particular, you can find an outline of the new functionality and issues we’ve fixed in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 and comprehensive details on the respective blogs below: If you encounter a bug or an issue, please report it throug...
Now Available – SQL Server Data Tools and Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012
This week we released two new sets of tools, which help Visual Studio 2012 users take advantage of the latest Microsoft development platforms. SQL Server Data Tools Yesterday we released SQL Server Data Tools - Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2012 (or “SSDT BI” for short). This release includes project templates for SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). You can see these examples in the New Project dialog below. To learn more about the release, please visit the SQL Server Reporting Services Team Blog for the complete announ...