Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Visual Studio Customer Feedback Channels
We’ve shipped Visual Studio 2015 RTM and you have all been a key part of this with your feedback and great ideas, Thank you! But wait, that doesn’t mean your job is over :). We still need to hear from you about what is good, bad, or ugly in VS 2015 so we can know what to do more of, what to fix, and what to avoid. We look at EVERY piece of feedback that you send to us to decide what to fix, what to change, and what we need to do in our next version. If you don’t tell us, we won’t know and we’ll do what we think you want and we aren’t always good mind readers. So what do we wan...
Targeting Windows 10 with your Apache Cordova app
This April, in concert with Windows 10 Technical Preview 2, we debuted support for the Windows 10 platform for Apache Cordova. Now, with the availability of Windows 10, full Windows 10 support is part of the Windows Apache Cordova platform and native to Visual Studio 2015. Apache Cordova allows you to write apps targeting iOS, Android, Windows, and Windows Phone (and other platforms) with a single code base using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Support for the Universal Windows platform now means that from this single code base you can also target the entire family of Windows 10 devices—desktop, phone, ta...
Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0
Last week we announced the release of the Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0. 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. For VSTU 2.0, the team put a strong focus on improving and optimizing the debugging experience. Since we released VSTU 1.9 almost a year ago it has been downloaded over 300,000 times. Over the course of the last year, we shipped two previews of VSTU 2.0: VSTU 2.0 Preview and VSTU 2.0 Preview 2. Each preview allowing us to share new features and bug fixes as soon as they were r...
The Visual Studio Partner Ecosystem
One of the unique values Visual Studio provides is that over and above the built-in features we have a multitude of extensions to address various niche development scenarios. These extensions are provided by our strong partner ecosystem. The Visual Studio Partner Ecosystem is the strongest it has ever been in the history of Visual Studio. This year we are excited to share that over 1100 partners have created tools and extensions that integrate with Visual Studio 2015, Team Foundation Server, and Visual Studio Online. For Visual Studio 2015 RTM release itself we have 84 launch partners that have made new versions ...
Visual Studio 2015 Diagnostics Investments
When we wrapped up the last release of Visual Studio, I wrote a blog post titled: Visual Studio 2013 Diagnostics Investments, which gathered all the links to our blog posts and other content into a single place. It seems fitting to do the same now that VS2015 has RTM’d, and the same intro I wrote last time applies, so I won’t repeat that here. When I think of the Diagnostics Investments we made in this release, I classify them into 4 broad buckets: platform support, addressing customer feedback, catching performance issues early, and historical debugging with IntelliTrace. Platform support Every ti...
Identity Management Features in Visual Studio 2015
In Visual Studio 2015 we have made radical changes to sign in experiences and connecting to your online resources. You can now chose to use a single account across many developer services, or use multiple accounts across Visual Studio. All of this is possible because of the new Visual Studio Account Manager. The account manager makes every sign-in global to the IDE, reducing the number of times Visual Studio prompts for credentials when connecting to different services. The account manager also enables you to switch easily between multiple accounts, so that you no longer have any sign-out-then-sign-in-again flows...
Visual Studio 2015 RTM: What’s New in the IDE
Visual Studio 2015 was released yesterday. Throughout the prereleases, you've seen some major announcements, from the new VS 2015 product lineup introducing Visual Studio Enterprise and Visual Studio Code, to the release of a free Visual Studio Community Edition with support for VS extensions. We've listened to your feedback on these products and have been maturing them for what we're excited to now share as the RTM version of Visual Studio 2015. To see a full summary of all that’s new in Visual Studio 2015, please see John's post announcing the release of VS 2015 and VS 2013 update 5. In this post, we'll ...
Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 Released
[UPDATED 8/7] The final release of TFS 2015 is now available. Brian Harry's post highlights some key capabilities like Agile Project Management, Continuous Delivery, Git improvements, and Extensibility. He also has links for download and release notes. [UPDATED 7/29] Windows 10, Tools for Windows 10, and Windows 10 support in Apache Cordova Platform are all available today. Check out Soma's post to learn about building app for Windows 10 with VS 2015 and also Polita's post on targeting Windows 10 with your Apache Cordova app. [Original Post] Today we released Visual Studio ...
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...