Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
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...
GitHub Integration in Developer Assistant
Developer Assistant for Visual Studio is a productivity plugin that brings the combined power of Bing Code Search capabilities and contextual help to day-to-day developer problems, like resolving code errors and searching for projects and code samples. Developer Assistant has taken a big leap with integration of GitHub in the latest version. GitHub hosts the largest open source community in the world. Many popular Microsoft open source projects like .Net foundation, Node.js, and Bootstrap are already hosted on GitHub. It also hosts API usage samples for popular open source libraries, like HTMLAgilityPack, Newton...
Playing with VS Extensibility
[Updated] In a presentation to developers in the //build keynote on Thursday, April 30, we demonstrated a Minecraft mod as an example of Visual Studio’s extensibility and ecosystem. With a gift for understatement, that demo caused a little bit of confusion. We should clarify our intent: this was not an announcement about Minecraft, or an official endorsement of modding, or the release of a Minecraft-specific modding tool or API. We just wanted to show Visual Studio’s ability to draw on its ecosystem of extensions to do something interesting – in this case, we used a Java plugin from Sam Harwel...
Introducing the Windows 10 Apache Cordova platform
NOTE: This blogpost is outdated. Build your Cordova project into a Windows 10 (UWP) app by following the instructions here: http://taco.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/run-app-windows/ Apache Cordova allows developers to write apps targeting iOS, Android, Windows, and Windows Phone with a single codebase using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Today, Apache Cordova support for Windows 10 is available for developers to begin experimenting with building Cordova apps that support the Universal Windows platform. The new Universal Windows platform allows developers to target a variety of Windows 10 devices with a single app ...
BUILD 2015 News: Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio 2015 RC, Team Foundation Server 2015 RC, Visual Studio 2013 Update 5
[UPDATED 8/5] Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013 Update 5, and .NET 4.6 were released on 7/20/2015. Check out this post announcing VS 2015 and VS 2013 Update 5 and this one announcing .NET framework 4.6. [Original Post] The Microsoft BUILD conference is typically a time when we release a lot of developer tools. This year we may have outdone ourselves. I’m going to talk a little about what we released today, but you’ll probably want to look at the announcements on Scott Guthrie’s Blog and Terry Myerson’s post on the Windows blog as well as Soma’s blog and Brian Harry&...