Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop
With Visual Studio 2012, we strive to provide the best development experience across all Microsoft platforms. This includes enabling developers to bring to life the richness of Windows desktop applications - whether you are learning to build your first app or whether you’ve been developing on Microsoft platforms for many years. A few weeks ago, we shared our plans for the Express editions of Visual Studio 2012. As we've worked to deliver the best experience with Visual Studio for our platforms with Windows 8, Windows Phone, and for Web and Windows Azure, we heard from our community that developers want to have...
A DESIGN WITH ALL-CAPS
Let’s talk about the all-caps menus. When we shared the RC design preview with you, we expected the uppercase menu would generate mixed feedback and emotions. We had seen similar reactions from early adopters and from our own internal users prior to posting about it. Rest assured that we’ve heard you, and we’ve been thinking through what should be done here. Using uppercase for the menus was not an arbitrary decision, and I think it will help the discussion to frame why we made this change. We’ve chosen to use uppercase styling in the top menu for two main reasons: 1) to keep Visual Stud...
Announcing the Microsoft “Roslyn” June 2012 CTP
In Soma’s previous blog post, we announced the first CTP of the Roslyn project. Roslyn is a forward looking project that enables the C# and VB compilers to be used as a service. Today, as Jason Zander discusses in more detail, we’re excited to announce the second Roslyn CTP – with full support for Visual Studio 2012 RC. You can get the CTP from http://msdn.com/Roslyn/, or go directly to the download. We’ve also released a NuGet Package that includes the Roslyn Compiler APIs and pieces that do not have a dependency on Visual Studio. Support for Visual Studio 2012 RC This version of the Ro...
Setup Improvements for Visual Studio
Setup is the first experience most of us have of Visual Studio, and in the Visual Studio 2012 we’ve made significant investments in improving your experience. Many of you have already told us you like our new setup user interface (thank you!). We have also been investing in ratcheting up the speed at which we lay bits down, improving the experience for non-English installations, and honing the experience you use to select which components to install. Let’s start by looking at the last of these first. As many of you noted, the Visual Studio 2012 (11) beta didn’t have the capability to customize ...
Visual Studio 2012 RC Available Now!
Today, we're excited to announce that Visual Studio 2012 RC is now available for download on our Visual Studio product website. Since the release of Beta, we’ve been hard at work making final touches, addressing top customer feedback from Beta, and improving performance across the IDE. Take an in-depth look at what's new in the Release Candidate (RC) of Visual Studio 2012 RC and .NET Framework 4.5 on Jason Zander’s blog. We also encourage you to check out the new Windows 8 App Developer Blog to learn more about how to build great Metro style apps for Windows 8. Last week, we gave you a sneak peak at the use...
Welcome to the Developer Tools Blog Network
Sometimes it can be hard to keep up with all the top content across our many developer blogs. This makes sense, given that we have thousands of blogs! We want to make it easier for you to find and subscribe to the topics you’re interested in. Today we’re introducing the Developer Tools blog network, which connects the top Microsoft developer blogs. You can see that as a member of network, this blog now contains a set of tabs at the top, which make it easy to discover and navigate to blogs in different topic areas: If you go to the Developer Tools blog network site itself, you will see an aggregate...
Visual Studio Dark Theme
As we’re closing in on the final designs for Visual Studio 11 I want to thank you again for your feedback. I want to pass along that we are still internalizing your feedback and actively working on the next Visual Studio 11 milestones. The purpose of this post is to follow up on a common request relating to the earlier RC preview post. The request was for more information on the Visual Studio 11 dark theme. Leading up to our being engineering complete for RC we focused most of our design attention on optimizing the light theme experience, because that’s what our telemetry indicates the majority of y...
Visual Studio 11 Performance: Improvements in Typing and Editing Responsiveness
After the beta release, we published several posts on the performance improvements in Visual Studio 11. Since the beta release, we have made a number of additional enhancements, continuing our quest to improve the performance of Visual Studio. The performance work done between beta and the upcoming RC was substantial and covered many aspects of the product including XAML (compiler, loading documents, and the design surface), C++, TLM, Debugging and the list goes on. We plan to blog about a few examples. In this post we’ll cover typing responsiveness, and in the next post we’ll cover the Toolbox – both of which ar...
A look ahead at the Visual Studio 11 product lineup and platform support
Today, we want to share the final product lineup and specifications you can expect to see for the next release of Visual Studio. This also includes system requirements and platform you can develop for with Visual Studio 11. Product Lineup In addition to the product line up announced previously we will also be releasing Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone as part the Visual Studio family. Visual Studio 11 Express products are designed to be simple and easy for building modern applications on the latest Microsoft platforms, including Windows 8, Windows Phone, Windows Azure and for the Web. Express products su...