Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Notifications in Visual Studio 2013
One of the benefits to having a connected IDE is that your environment can be kept up to date easily by presenting you with notifications of updates and relevant account information. Visual Studio will not only keep your environment up to date but also keep you in control of your preferred configurations. There are two main avenues for presenting you with notifications of an event in your environment that requires your attention. The first avenue is Contextual notification presentation, which requires immediate surfacing to provide developers real-time information based on an action that has been performed ...
Supercharged Styling: Quickly Finding and Setting a CSS Property in Blend
A core goal of Blend for Visual Studio is to make it fast and easy for developers who care about the quality of their markup to create professional looking apps. One of the many ways that the HTML Designer in Blend can speed up the CSS editing experience when developing Windows Store apps is by providing immediate visual feedback and enabling direct editing on a design surface that is actually running your application. In addition, the CSS Property Inspector (CSS PI) has been designed to allow you to target specific CSS rules with these edits via the “Applied Style Rules” list and to further provid...
Visual Studio 2013 RC available now!
Today, we announced that the Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate is now available for download on our Visual Studio product site. We are also excited to share that the Visual Studio 2013 Launch is on Nov 13th 2013. Save the date to participate in all the excitement, more details about the event can be found on the events page. Visual Studio 2013 RC works seamlessly side-by-side with Visual Studio 2012. It can also be installed on top of Visual Studio 2013 Preview without having to uninstall Preview. However, please note that, Windows Store app development requires Windows 8.1 RTM, which is available to MSD...
What’s new for HTML Developers in Blend for Visual Studio 2013
At Windows’ Build conference in June, we introduced Visual Studio and Blend 2013 Preview to the world. With this release, we significantly expanded Visual Studio’s support for creating Window Store Apps using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. In addition to the client-side diagnostics and debugging tools found in Visual Studio, Blend also added a host of features intended to improve productivity by breaking the edit-and-refresh cycle that plagues UI design & development. In this post, we’ll take a behind-the-scenes look at three of the most significant improvements made to HTML/CSS development in B...
What’s new in Visual Studio 2013 and InstallShield Limited Edition
UPDATE: We’re happy to announce the availability of the Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension. This extension provides support for Visual Studio Installer projects in Visual Studio 2013. You can download the extension from the Visual Studio Gallery. To learn more check out this blog post on Visual Studio Installer Projects extension. We believe it is important to provide Visual Studio developers a no-cost setup tooling solution to deploy applications to the various platforms you target. In Visual Studio 2010 we partnered with Flexera Software to included InstallShield Limited Edition, a free ver...
XAML Editor Improvements in Visual Studio 2013
While many of you like creating XAML using our visual tools, many prefer creating XAML in the code editor as well. Your feedback was heard loud and clear and we have taken a crack at the top XAML editor feature requests in Visual Studio 2013. This blog post describes the new editor features in detail and how you can use them! IntelliSense for Data Binding IntellISense for properties of the current data context is now available in binding expressions. In order for the editor to resolve the properties we require the data context to be specified on the view and not set in code-behind. If you choose to specify the ...
Update for Extension Authors: VSIX Manifest Version Range Attribute
In Visual Studio 2010 we introduced a new deployment model for extensions, the VSIX format. This format is based on the Open Packaging Conventions and enables extension developers to create a single package that can be easily installed by Visual Studio and contain all the appropriate files to describe the extension. For Visual Studio 2012 we wanted to add additional functionality to how we can manage the deployment process for extensions so we updated the VSIX Schema to version 2.0. This schema enabled us to support the concept of extension and platform SDKs that provide library functionality for tooling on spec...
Enabling IntelliSense for Mobile Services JavaScript in Visual Studio
In a previous post , we shared the new Windows Azure Mobile Services integration and capabilities in Visual Studio 2013. These include the ability to edit your Mobile Services table scripts. In this post, we describe how you can enable IntelliSense on your server side scripts in Visual Studio. This is a capability that isn’t integrated in Visual Studio 2013 Preview, following the steps below will help you turn it on. To get started, download our IntelliSense definition files from here . Save these files to a relatively easy to access path. How much IntelliSense? The files we're releasing today provide you In...
Windows Azure Mobile Services in Visual Studio 2013
With new tools for Windows Azure Mobile Services, Visual Studio 2013 helps you quickly build connected Windows Store apps. We’ve made it very easy for you to associate your app with Mobile Services, create new tables and services, edit your server side scripts, and most importantly enhance your apps with push notifications all from within Visual Studio. This blog post provides an overview of the features. To get more details, take a look at the Windows Azure Mobile Services Tools in Visual Studio 2013 Toolbox episode and our extensive documentation. Get Connected With the new Services Manager experience, you ca...