Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
Save the date! Visual Studio 2015 Final Release
The final release of Visual Studio 2015 is coming soon! Mark your calendars for the celebrations on July 20th 2015. This event featuring tools for any developer and any app will start with Soma’s keynote streamed live starting 8:30 am PDT. New this year, you will have the opportunity to see the Visual Studio team creating an end-to-end solution for an open-source project, leveraging the newest tools and technologies. See how they tackle the different problems along the way, and ask them questions directly! We will have live, interactive Q&A sessions with engineering teams. You can also watch over 60...
Share Your Open Source Extension on the Visual Studio Gallery!
In a recent post on Extending Visual Studio 2015 we shared how easy it is to create Visual Studio extensions. We also shared links to our improved docs and to our presence on GitHub. Continuing in this vein of improvements to make it super easy to write and share extensions, I’d like to share the improved integration with GitHub in the Visual Studio Gallery. Today there are thousands of very useful open source extensions in the VS gallery with their code hosted on GitHub. These open source extensions provide a chance for other developers to learn and collaborate, and for the extension authors to get feedba...
Top News from May 2015
Hello everyone! Every month I share some top stories from the previous month. Here’s an overview of some top posts in May. Top Trending Content for May 2015 .NET at Build 2015. On the .NET blog, Richard Lander shared 2 interesting posts. .NET Announcements at Build 2015 is an excellent one-stop shop for everything you need to know about the latest updates in .NET core, .NET Execution Environment (DNX), .NET languages, ASP.NET, Entity framework, and all of the improvements in Visual Studio for .NET. Targeting the .NET framework 4.6 RC has details about the latest version of the .NET Framework and the new A...
JavaScript Editor Improvements in Visual Studio 2015
JavaScript is an important technology for development on many different platforms, including web, mobile app, and server programming. In Visual Studio 2013 we already support IntelliSense, Go to Definition, colorization, and formatting of JavaScript source, along with several other features. We’ve carried these forward into Visual Studio 2015 and we’ve improved the experience for JavaScript developers by focusing on three key areas: Each of these areas was chosen based on feedback we heard on UserVoice, through social media, via the send-a-smile/frown feature in Visual Studio, and from many...
Developing for iOS using the Tools for Apache Cordova
Most developers are already familiar with Xamarin and C++ for iOS development, but Visual Studio 2015 also delivers a quick and easy way for developers to build iOS, Android, and Windows apps using JavaScript. The Tools for Apache Cordova are ideal for projects where speed-to-market, maintainability, and code re-use are paramount. Apache Cordova’s web standards based approach combined with its flexible plugin model allows you to tap into a large and growing client-side web development community. Open source resources are plentiful at all layers of the stack – not just for accessing native APIs via Cordova plugins...
Introducing the Project System Extensibility Preview
[Update 6/4: We've updated this post to clarify the roadmap of this project to become part of the Visual Studio SDK, once it moves past the Preview phase.] We are very pleased and excited to announce the availability of the Project System Extensibility Preview. With it, you can define a new project type and begin writing extensions to customize the user experience or add features in just a few minutes while owning very little code. Gone are the days where you have to create or maintain an entire project system (usually a fork based on MPFproj) often containing well over 100K lines of code. Instead, you'll be bui...
Tools for Apache Cordova – Samples and Docs
Open source code is the norm for so many developers these days, and unsurprisingly, so is open documentation. From Azure to TypeScript, public repositories have become a go-to place for sharing samples, tutorials, and “tips and tricks” so that everyone can learn and contribute together as a community. So beginning today, we’re joining the party, starting with our Cordova docs. You can find Cordova samples and tutorials and “tips and tricks” in our GitHub repo. These assets won’t replace the Cordova documentation already found on MSDN. Instead, they’ll complement our ex...
Extending Visual Studio 2015
When we decided to expand Visual Studio 2015 in the hopes of making it *the* premier platform for cross-platform development, we acknowledged that the ability for our customers to extend, customize, and generally make it their own was absolutely, critically important. It is a win-win: make an extension and you get a product or tailored experience for your specific scenario, and we – Microsoft – see Visual Studio’s potential audience get a little bit bigger and a little bit happier. After 7 years of growing the Visual Studio Platform, it has become rather bulky and packed with features. In addit...
Debugging Tips and Tricks
Unfortunately bugs are a part of software development, and despite our best efforts to write software correctly from the start we spend a lot of time in the debugger. While bugs are an unfortunate fact of life, finding them doesn’t have to be as painful as it often is. For you problem-solvers out there, the Visual Studio 2015 debugger contains a rich set of features that can really increase your productivity…assuming you know they exist, and how to use them! To help with you learn more about our debugging tools, I recently gave three talks on “Debugging Tips and Tricks for .NET developers&rdquo...