Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
Visual Studio 2013 Launch Partners
On November 13, 2013, we launched Visual Studio 2013 at our launch event in New York City, and we’re excited to share that 74 of our Visual Studio Launch Partners are delivering 123 integrated products for you to use as well! Visit the Visual Studio 2013 Virtual Launch site to watch launch keynotes, presentations, demos, and learn all about each of our launch partners and their products. As with the release of any new product, we are always looking to ensure that our new tools can be easily adopted by our developers. We are very fortunate and proud to have a large and diverse community of partners that fee...
Visual Studio 2013 Launched!
Visual Studio 2013 has launched! If you missed watching the launch event live, watch the keynote here. Check out Somasegar’s blog for details on new announcements made today. We also have a wealth of videos posted on Channel 9 for you to see what VS 2013 has in store for you. Here are a few of our favorites: What's New in Visual Studio 2013 Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) Introducing Visual Studio 2013 for Windows Store Developers building HTML Apps Creating Quality Applications Using Microsoft Application Lifecycle Tools Introducing Visual Studio Online What’s New for Web Developers in V...
Updates to Editor Enhancements in Visual Studio 2013
In Visual Studio 2013 we have added many new features to the editor. To get a low down on how these features can help enhance productivity checkout our previous post on Visual Studio 2013 New Editor Features as well as What’s new in Visual Studio 2013 – IDE on MSDN. Today, we want to share updates to these features that you will see in the final product. Peek Definition (Alt + F12) is now Editable! In Visual Studio 2013 Preview, we introduced an amazing new feature called “Peek Definition (Alt + F12)” that allowed you to browse definitions of symbols inline in the Editor keeping your context and place in cod...
Windows Azure SDK 2.2 Release
Yesterday we announced the release of the Windows Azure SDK version 2.2 for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013. This release includes several new highly requested customer features like Integrated Sign In, Remote Debugging preview, Edit and Continue for Cloud Services, SQL Databases in Server Explorer, and Publishing Cloud Services to Affinity Groups. In addition with VS2013, we’ve also included Logs for Windows Azure Mobile Services. In this blog post, we’ll share more details on these new exciting features. We’ve integrated the Sign In experience directly in Visual Studio so you can Sign In to Windows Azure with yo...
Visual Studio 2013 released to web!
Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download! We hope you are as delighted with this release as we are to bring it to you. You can learn more about what's new in Visual Studio 2013 on the Visual Studio website. Also mark your calendars to join us for the Visual Studio 2013 virtual launch event on November 13th! If you haven’t tried out Visual Studio 2013 Preview or RC, when you first launch Visual Studio 2013 you’ll be invited to sign in to Visual Studio with a Microsoft Account. When you sign in with your Microsoft account, Visual Studio will remember your top settings and automatically synchronize...
Asynchronous Solution Load Performance Improvements in Visual Studio 2013
Improving Solution Loads Over the past few years, the Visual Studio team has been working hard to improve Visual Studio performance and scalability when working with large solutions. One area of particular interest to many of you has been our initial solution load times. For Visual Studio 2012, we implemented changes that enabled large solutions to load asynchronously, which results in substantially faster load times for many of our users. For Visual Studio 2013, we’ve continued to improve solution load performance by deferring the initialization of document tabs until they are needed. In this post, we’ll walk y...
LightSwitch Performance Win in Visual Studio 2013
With the release of Visual Studio 2013 RC, we on the LightSwitch Team have made some changes in how much bandwidth our HTML Client and Server use when communicating. Let’s take a look at what we did and how it can be useful to both developers and users of LightSwitch applications. A Slimmer ODATA Format LightSwitch uses a REST-based protocol called ODATA for communication between the Client and the Server. ODATA can be formatted a few different ways. Some of these ways are more verbose than others, but fortunately for us the ODATA team at Microsoft recently worked on ways to make ODATA less verbose. The Li...
Visual Studio Start Page: Through the ages
When we started planning the first truly integrated version of Visual Studio (prior to that Visual Studio was predominantly a collection of tools boxed together) we wanted to help developers get started with the new version. To do this we introduce a common start page for Visual Studio. Visual Studio.NET Figure 1 Visual Studio .NET – Implemented as a set of vertical tabs down the left hand side The goal of this start page was to provide a location, available when the product first started, for the user to either find out about Visual Studio or to easily get back to what they were working on...
Designing pixel perfect layouts in Visual Studio 2013 and Blend
It’s a familiar scenario. You’re developing your application and you’ve got a design in mind. It may have come from a professional designer or a sketch on the back of a cocktail napkin, but you need to move from a concept to a working, implemented design. This can be easier said than done. When your design calls for the baseline of that text to be exactly 100px from the top, but that baseline is within a control template buried in a custom control, it’s a headache to figure out what value needs to be tweaked to get that precise position. In another case, you want the Image to be exactly 300px wide, but your as...