Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Agent mode is now generally available with MCP support
Copilot agent mode is the next evolution in AI-assisted development—and it's now generally available in the Visual Studio June update. Agent mode turns GitHu...
Latest posts
Announcing Update to Productivity Power Tools 2013
Today, we’re releasing an update to Productivity Power Tools 2013 on the Visual Studio Gallery. In this release, we fixed a number of customer-reported bugs and issues, and introduced a new feature called syntactic line compression. Syntactic line compression enables you to make better use of your screen’s vertical real-estate. It shrinks lines that contain neither letters nor numbers by 25% vertically, allowing more lines to be displayed in the editor. Other lines are not affected. Here’s an illustration of the same code before and after the feature is applied. You can see the extra lines you...
Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 is here!
We’re excited to share that the final release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 is ready to download. If you are already using Visual Studio 2013 then you’ll soon have a notification waiting for you in the notification hub to start the download and install Update 2 for Visual Studio 2013. If you haven’t started using Visual Studio 2013 you can get all the new capabilities and fixes with a single install that includes Visual Studio 2013 RTM and all the features in Update 2. We also have Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 available as an ISO.To find all the latest downloads for Visual Studio go to http://www.visualstudio.com...
Improving Setup in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2
A few weeks ago at the Build conference, we released a release candidate of the second update to Visual Studio 2013. This update of Visual Studio contained significant new functionality including being able to create Universal Apps for both Windows and Windows Phone. To be able to target Windows Phone, developers need to use emulators which run the Windows Phone operating system within the developer’s Windows installation. These emulators are full virtual machines and are therefore quite large (hundreds of megabytes). While they are a necessary component for Windows Phone development, they are not necessary...
TypeScript 1.0 Released and Open for Contributions
Recently, we announced the release of TypeScript 1.0. In addition, we’re excited to say that TypeScript is now taking code contributions from the community. This is a significant milestone for the TypeScript project and team! TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that adds types to JavaScript to make it easier to build large-scale JavaScript applications. TypeScript compiles to ECMAScript-compliant JavaScript that runs in every browser and on every platform. TypeScript debuted in October 2012, starting out as an open source project on CodePlex. Over the last year and a half, TypeScript has grown into a mature...
Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension
UPDATE 6/12/2014: We have released the final version of this extension - v1.0.0.0. This release addresses: Unfortunately we couldn't address all cases of the command line issue for this release as we're still investigating the appropriate way to address them. What we do have is a workaround that we believe will work for almost all of them. If you are still suffering this issue then you can try to change the DWORD value for HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftVisualStudio12.0_ConfigMSBuildEnableOutOfProcBuild registry value to 0. If this doesn't exist you can create it as a DWORD. UPDATE 5/27/14:...
Enhancements to Debugging and Profiling in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2
Less than a year ago, I gave you a quick overview of the many investments we made to debugging and profiling in Visual Studio 2013 RTM and got some great feedback from you about what we’d done. Now, with Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC available for download, I wanted to run you through the enhancements we have made since last summer. We’ve done a lot, so this summary post mostly links to other posts. I wanted to talk about two of the larger efforts we’ve made first: the Performance and Diagnostics hub (from where you can run tools such as the HTML UI Responsiveness tool, XAML UI Responsiveness tool, and Energy...
Authoring Windows 8.1 Apps in XAML
At the BUILD conference last week, we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 and Blend for Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. We have been busy improving the overall experience of XAML development in Visual Studio and Blend, and this post gives you an overview of some of the cool new features we have added to this Update that you might have missed amongst all the other big and exciting headlines. Universal Apps for universal experiences! We have worked hard to make it easy for developers to share code between their Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 XAML apps, and at the same time deliver beautiful ...
Using Visual Studio to build Universal XAML Apps
At the Build conference, we announced the release of the new converged Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 platforms. As a developer, this means you can now build XAML and HTML universal apps that run on both Phone and Tablets by sharing a significant amount of code and content. To enable building universal apps, we added a number of new features to Visual Studio as part of the Visual Studio Update 2 RC. You have two ways to learn more about these features. One way is through this blog post. The other way is by watching my Build talk that covers all of the material you will see here in more detail: There is n...
Building Windows Phone 8.1 Apps in HTML
Last week at the BUILD conference, we announced that you can now build apps for Windows Phone 8.1 using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using much the same techniques you use for building Windows 8.1 Store apps today. To help you build these apps, we’ve made many improvements to Visual Studio 2013 and Blend for Visual Studio 2013. In this post, we highlight a handful of the cool and new improvements that you might find useful, with a particular focus on the universal Windows app technology. Universal Apps With the latest updates to Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1, you can create universal Windows apps for a common ...