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...
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Azure Virtual Machine Images for Visual Studio
Over the last year we have been constantly expanding our Visual Studio image offerings for the Microsoft Azure virtual machine gallery. The images have proven to be very popular not only for evaluating new Visual Studio releases but also for using them as developer environments in the cloud. In this post we’ll walk you through all the images that are available for MSDN and non-MSDN subscribers and what each of them is best suited for. Visual Studio images available in the public Azure virtual machine gallery Let’s look at what is available to every Azure customer first. As of November 12th 2014 we offer the fol...
Build and Run using Cordova CLI
With Apache Cordova, web developers can achieve maximal code re-use by building cross-platform mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. For details on how Apache Cordova works, read this blog. In order to build such a cross platform multi device application, Visual Studio uses a Cordova utility known as the Cordova command-line interface (CLI). The CLI allows Visual Studio to build projects for many platforms at once, abstracting away much of the functionality of lower-level shell scripts. The CLI copies a common set of web assets into sub-directories for each mobile platform, makes any necessary con...
Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio
Today we are releasing the RTM version of Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio! To get started, download Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio 2013 or Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio 2012 from the Visual Studio Extension Gallery. This extension provides smart, contextual help to solve every day dev problems like searching for projects, code samples and resolving code errors, all from within the Visual Studio IDE. You can also watch this channel 9 video which talks in detail about what’s new in Bing Developer Assistant (a.k.a BDA). This new BDA (formerly Bing Code Search), includes ever...
Incorporate “Big Data” Within Your Visual Studio App Using Azure HDInsight
To help make it easier to work with “big data” in your apps, we added support for Hive queries and management of data clusters with Azure HDInsight, the Microsoft Azure Hadoop cluster solution for Visual Studio. For Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, HDInsight support comes in a Visual Studio extension in the Azure SDK, and it’s baked into Visual Studio 2015 Preview. The extension makes it easier for you to visualize your Hadoop clusters, tables, and associated storage from within Visual Studio. It also supports creating and submitting ad hoc Hive queries for HDInsight directly against a cluster from within Visual Stud...
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...