Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
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...
Building Mobile Apps with Ionic and Monaca
Cordova makes it easy to build an app for iOS, Android, or Windows using web technologies. While the Blank project templates provide all the raw materials to build your basic “Hello World”, you’ve told us that you’d like to see richer starting points that use best practices vetted by the community, well-modeled design patterns, and advice on how to make slick-looking apps in less time. We hear you! We’ve collaborated with some of the most respected mobile developers in the industry to bring great starting points into Visual Studio. Specifically, we called upon the wizards at Ionic and Monaca to give you projec...
Top News from April 2015
This top trending post is a collection of what we think are some of the top stories in April. This is our third such post (top news from February 2015, top news from March 2015) and we would love to hear your feedback. Are these posts interesting and informational? Do you have other blogs or articles to share with us? Let us know by leaving a comment below. Top Trending Content for April 2015 BUILD 2015 News: VS Code, VS 2015 RC, TFS 2015 RC, VS 2013 Update 5 RC. BUILD 2015 is a 3-day Microsoft Developer event that was held this year April 29th – May 1st. As with every year we had a lot to share thi...
Introducing Visual Studio’s Network tool
Last week we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2015 RC which includes a brand new tool to help you diagnose network related issues when building Windows apps across the Windows continuum from Windows Phone, to HoloLens, to Xbox. This new Network tool is part of the existing Performance and Diagnostics hub - the following screenshot show it in action. Historically, web developers had relied on in-browser tools for network diagnostics, but it has been a more complicated ordeal for app developers due the lack of tools that integrate into their development workflow. With Visual Studio’s new Network ...
Tools for Apache Cordova in Visual Studio 2015 RC
We are excited to announce that Visual Studio 2015 RC will include the Tools for Apache Cordova. Starting today, you can build production quality mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows using web technologies and nearly 100% shared code across platforms. With support for native device capabilities (e.g. camera, accelerometer, contact), offline scenarios and popular JavaScript frameworks (e.g. Angular, React and Backbone), the Tools for Apache Cordova contain everything web developers need for building cross-platform mobile apps using Visual Studio. If you’re one of the thousands of developers who followed...
Announcing the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio
Today, Steven Guggenheimer announced Microsoft's collaboration with GitHub and introduced several projects that make it easier for developers on GitHub to work with Visual Studio and Azure. In particular, the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio released today by GitHub lets you clone your existing GitHub repositories, create new repositories, and navigate to important GitHub features like Pull Requests, Issues, and Reports from inside VS. The extension builds on the Git support already in Team Explorer so you get a consistent experience for commits, branching, and conflict resolution no matter what remote reposito...