Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Announcing a free GitHub Copilot for Visual Studio
We're excited to announce an all new free plan for GitHub Copilot, available for everyone today in Visual Studio. All you need is a GitHub account. No trial. No...
Latest posts
JavaScript Editor Improvements in Visual Studio 2013 Preview
[Updated 10/18/2013] The JavaScript navigation was removed from the final release of Visual Studio 2013. The decision to do this was difficult and driven by a need to optimize stability and performance after we received feedback from many of you working with the Preview and RC versions of this feature. We also heard some great feedback about the usefulness of the navigation bar and understand that many of you were looking forward to this coming in the final product. We will be considering a return of the navigation bar for a future release. [end] In Visual Studio 2012, we added many new features for Java...
Visual Studio 2013 Preview Survey
It’s been 2 weeks since we released Visual Studio 2013 Preview, and we’d like to hear what you think about it. Let us know your impressions by taking the Visual Studio 2013 Preview survey.We do these surveys with most of our releases, and they help us gain deep insights on how we are doing with core areas such as quality, reliability, performance and overall satisfaction.In this survey, we’re also looking for your opinions on areas such as .NET compatibility, project/solution compatibility and theming. Your input will help us continue to improve Visual Studio. We greatly appreciate your fe...
Visual Studio 2013 New Editor Features
[10/31/2013 : Updates to these features can be found in the latest post on Updates to Visual Studio 2013 Editor Enhancements] In Visual Studio 2013, we have introduced new features that boost productivity and save time when working inside the Editor. Some of these are new features and some are the most popular extensions from Productivity Power Tools. These features are a result of the feedback you gave us through User Voice requests, forum posts and Connect bugs. The MVP community also helped us pick some of these experiences. Our primary focus for the Editor in this version is to keep the developer in con...
Overview of Related Files in Blend
Related Files is a feature available in both Blend for Visual Studio 2012 and Blend for Visual Studio 2013 Preview. In this post, I’ll describe how this feature works and how to make the best of it when designing your Windows Store app in HTML. When you are performing styling-related tasks in an HTML document, it is common (if not, desirable) to view both your HTML and CSS at the same time. With Windows Store apps written in HTML, the same workflow is applicable, with some increased complexity of the styling tasks you are trying to perform. Windows Store apps are very modular and often structured hierarchic...
The Story of Synchronized Settings
As you may have read in our post about signing into Visual Studio 2013, one benefit of signing in is the ability to roam your product’s settings across machines. In this post I’ll tell you more about the Synchronized Settings feature. When looking at feedback from customers or requests for new features that enhance productivity, a few requests easily surfaced right to the top. Everyone wanted their Visual Studio IDE installed in minutes, set up in seconds, and ready to use in a blink! This request wasn’t just about a faster install & setup process but begged us to broaden the scope of user convenience when...
Visual Studio Performance – Providing Feedback
With VS 2013 Preview now available for download, we’re excited to share how we’ve been using the feedback and data you’ve shared with us to drive performance improvements to Visual Studio. In this first post, we’ll walk through how we’re prioritizing and scheduling performance investments based on your feedback, and outline the best ways for you to provide additional feedback on performance. We’ll also highlight a few product improvements available for you to try out today. Over the next few weeks, we’ll follow-up with additional blog posts that walk through the details on how we’ve evolved our performance te...
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Applications today are leveraging the cloud to deliver personalized experiences and offer new capabilities. So it’s no surprise the tool used to build those applications is also putting the connected developer at the center of the IDE. In Visual Studio 2012, a few features already offered connected experiences that brought online services to specific features in Visual Studio. Team Explorer was one of the first by connecting developers to team development and collaboration tools in the cloud through Team Foundation Services online. Windows Store has integration into the Windows Store projects allowing you ...
What’s new in Visual Studio 2013 Preview for authoring Windows Store XAML apps
Today at BUILD we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 and Blend that brings forward significant advances for authoring XAML-based Windows Store apps for Windows 8.1. This post describes some of the new experiences we are excited to bring to you. In follow up posts, we will describe each of these experiences in greater detail – so stay tuned. Everything we’ll tell you about today is only available for Windows Store apps with Visual Studio 2013. To try these exciting new capabilities, you’ll need to either re-target your existing Windows 8 app (retargeting guidance here), or create a...
Designing the Visual Studio 2013 User Experience
As we were beginning the development of Visual Studio 2012, the user experience teams from across Microsoft worked together to align the design of our products and services around a set of core company-wide design principles that each product and service applied to their specific domain. Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, Office 2013, and Visual Studio 2012 were the first wave of releases to reflect these shared principles in their new designs. Having a more unified and consistent experience is growing in importance as we increasingly interconnect the new device platforms, tools, and services we are introducing this ye...