Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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JavaScript memory analysis for Windows Store apps in Visual Studio 2012
In Visual Studio 2012 Update 1, we introduced a JavaScript memory analysis tool for Windows Store apps to help developers, you, build apps that do not leak memory, so that these apps are more reliable, potentially more responsive and therefore have the potential to be more highly rated by customers. You will find the memory analysis tool applicable to Visual Studio for Windows 8 – Express, Visual Studio 2012 Professional, Premium and Ultimate on Windows 8. Our goal was to provide a way for you to identify unintentionally retained memory within stateful JavaScript applications, so that you can more: ...
Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 is here
Today, the Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (Visual Studio 2012.1) is available for download. You can get it now via the Visual Studio 2012.1 download page (see "Visual Studio 2012 Update 1" under the "Additional software" section). For an overview of the main updates included in Visual Studio 2012.1, please visit Soma’s blog. As he mentions in his post, “This [update] isn’t just about bug fixes, though it contains plenty of those (Visual Studio 2012.1 includes more than a 100 fixes to measurably address issues reported through Connect and Windows Error Reporting). This update delivers a wealth of new functionality...
Productivity Power Tools 2012
By popular request, the new version of the Productivity Power Tools has arrived for Visual Studio 2012! These tools are the fruit of a few passionate engineers on the Visual Studio team that love sharing the power of Visual Studio with customers. The Productivity Power Tools are one of the top gallery extensions for Visual Studio 2010. With your feedback, some of the features made it into Visual Studio 2012 including Quick Find, Solution Explorer (Navigator), Quick Launch, and the new Add Reference dialog. The new edition enables the rest of the tools for Visual Studio 2012 and adds some new ones. In this post,...
Introducing Windows Phone SDK 8.0
It gives us great pleasure to announce that today at //build/ we launched the Windows Phone 8 development story. We have enhanced the existing Visual Studio 2012 developer tools to support development of Windows Phone 8 apps optimized for a variety of resolutions and hardware, introduced ability to simulate and monitor the impact of real life conditions on app quality and also enabled native C++ app development. Windows Phone SDK 8.0 is now available for download here. The SDK is based on Visual Studio 2012 and will be supported on Windows 8 x64 machines. This SDK contains everything you need to get started de...
Your Visual Studio, Your Colors
Since releasing Visual Studio 2012 we have continued on our investment in the user experience space to enable you to work more efficiently and to make the Visual Studio experience engaging and productive. One of the design principles we are following is the enablement of choice and personal customization in the product, and as part of developing the new Light and Dark themes in Visual Studio we invested in broadly extending the theme-able surface area of Visual Studio. Building on this work, I’m happy to announce that we now have available a Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor extension! This extension pr...
NuGet for Windows Store App Developers
In Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8 you’ll see that we have included the popular NuGet package manager by default and customized it to include a Windows 8 packages feed that presents you a filtered list of NuGet packages for use in developing your Windows Store apps. In case you haven’t heard of NuGet - it’s a package management tool that simplifies discovering, integrating, and managing external dependencies throughout the lifetime of your project. In the most basic scenario – you can use it to search a repository of packages (e.g. libraries like Entity Framework or knockoutjs) a...
Visual Studio 2012 SimShip Partners
A month ago we launched Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 at our launch event (http://www.visualstudiolaunch.com) in Seattle. At this event and online, we had a number of sessions showing how Visual Studio 2012 helps you build great applications. We are always looking to ensure that our new tools can be adopted by our users, and have invested in areas like Project Round Tripping to smooth the process. We are fortunate to have a large and diverse community of fans and partners producing extensions and add-ins to Visual Studio that users depend on, and expect to be able to use them on the latest version. We got clear...
Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop is Here
A few months ago, Soma announced plans for a Visual Studio Express 2012 edition for Windows Desktop. Today, we are happy to share that this new Express product is available for download. (You can find the system requirements and download details here.) This post is written by Jennifer Leaf, one of the program managers working on the new product. It would be impossible to list every feature in Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop. However, in this post I want to tell you about some of the new tools and capabilities in the product that have not been available in any other Express products in the past. ...
New Visual Studio 2012 Debugging Features for the Windows 8 App Lifecycle Model
Windows 8 brings a new app lifecycle model, in which Windows Store apps are automatically managed for the user. These apps always feel alive, even though they never run when they’re off the screen. This provides great benefits for power consumption and battery life. Here are a few related blog posts we recommend for background reading on this topic: In this post, we’ll take a look at what this all means for debugging. Of all the debugging advances we made in Visual Studio 2012 (from JavaScript debugging, to the Windows 8 Simulator, to remote debugging on Windows RT devices), the debugging expe...