Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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PyCon 2015: April 8-16
Many Visual Studio blog readers probably don’t know that Visual Studio has great support for Python or that Azure Machine Learning lets you write in Python, and I’m betting even fewer of you know that our Python Tools team is heading to PyCon Montreal. We’ll be there to hang out with other people who love Python as much as us, chat about the stuff we do, the stuff you do, and have plenty of fun. Microsoft is the Keystone sponsor this year, so you’re going to see us all over the place, and we’re thrilled that our contribution helps the Python Software Foundation cover expenses and pro...
Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview 2
Today we release Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview 2. VSTU is Microsoft’s free Visual Studio add-on that enables a rich programming and debugging experience for working with the Unity gaming tools and platform. The main feature of Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview 2 is the official support for Unity 5, the new major version of Unity that was released last month. VSTU is available for download on the Visual Studio Gallery at the following links: The support for Unity 5 aside, we continued to focus on bringing more features from the Visual Studio debugger to VSTU. The highlight...
Enhancements in Bing Developer Assistant March Update
In December 2014 we released the RTM version of Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio. This extension combines the power of Sample Browser and Bing Code Search to make it easy for you to find and reuse over 19 million code snippets and sample projects. Last month, we improved the user experience of Bing Developer Assistant in response to your feedback on the Visual Studio gallery. Many first-time users also told us that the name ‘Bing Developer Assistant’ was misleading and made it seem like this extension had something to do with ‘Bing Maps’ or ‘Bing API’. With this...
Top News from March 2015
It’s a pattern only if you see it happen at least twice, so here is our second post in the monthly top news series. This month again we looked at various content across the developer sphere and bring you what we think are some of the top stories. We hope you find this list useful and interesting; and of course we welcome your feedback. Top Trending Blogs for March 2015 Making the Internet of Things: Exploring the Littoral Space. Sam Stokes’s post on Making the Internet of Things Exploring the Littoral Space Data Storage was the fourth post /video in a series of content he published on Channel 9 Dev...
Announcing the Visual Studio 2015 Product Lineup
We’re continuing to improve upon the power and productivity of Visual Studio, making it easier to use, no matter what platform you’re on, no matter what app you’re building. We also want to make it easier for you to choose which edition of Visual Studio is the right one for you. Last November, we made Visual Studio Community 2013 available, our free, full featured and extensible IDE for non-enterprise application development. Today, we’re announcing the editions of Visual Studio 2015 that will be available when we release the final product this summer. I’m excited to share that we&r...
Visual Studio Upcoming Features Timeline
[UPDATE: 7/20/2015] You asked for it and you got it! We’ve added a Planned Date column on the VS Feature Timeline that will share quarter-year or half-year timeframes. Of course, these are subject to change but once we know the timeframe that a feature will ship in, you’ll know. [ORIGINAL POST] Over the past few years, Visual Studio has been shipping products on a quicker cadence to ensure our customers have the best and most up-to-date tools in the industry. As part of this, we have been working to be more and more transparent to help you understand what we’re working on and show you how truly valuable your ...
Updated ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit
If you use the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, you know that our long-time Visual Studio partner DevExpress maintains it, and that it’s free and open-source. Recently they released an updated and improved ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. You can download this new version here: devexpress.com/act In a short time that they have taken over the project, they have fixed the most glaring issues along with a number of other changes to make the Toolkit a solid library to have in your ASP.NET application. What's New The new release includes: There's a full list of what's new in the v15.1 release avail...
Node.js Tools 1.0 for Visual Studio
[UPDATE] We have updated this post. Look for an [UPDATE] tag to find the updates. Node.js Tools 1.0 for Visual Studio (NTVS) is now available for download! NTVS is a free, open source extension for Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013 that turns Visual Studio into a Node.js IDE. NTVS 1.0 supports the free Visual Studio Community and Visual Studio Express for Web editions, as well as Visual Studio Professional and higher. Node.js is a platform for building fast, scalable applications using JavaScript. It’s making its way just about everywhere – from servers, to Internet of Things devices, ...
Introducing the Azure API Apps Tools for Visual Studio 2013
With the Azure SDK 2.5.1 Release we took the opportunity to combine existing Web Publishing techniques with the new Azure Resource Management APIs to support Azure’s newest feature for Web, Mobile, and API developers – Azure App Service. We’ve added Azure API Apps as a publishing target for the ASP.NET developer, so you can make use of concepts like Resource Groups and App Hosting Plans in the new Azure portal, right within Visual Studio. Enable Developers with One-click Strongly-typed REST API Clients For developers who consistently need to consume REST APIs from various vendors or services, ...