Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
Visual Studio 2012 RC Available Now!
Today, we're excited to announce that Visual Studio 2012 RC is now available for download on our Visual Studio product website. Since the release of Beta, we’ve been hard at work making final touches, addressing top customer feedback from Beta, and improving performance across the IDE. Take an in-depth look at what's new in the Release Candidate (RC) of Visual Studio 2012 RC and .NET Framework 4.5 on Jason Zander’s blog. We also encourage you to check out the new Windows 8 App Developer Blog to learn more about how to build great Metro style apps for Windows 8. Last week, we gave you a sneak peak at the use...
Welcome to the Developer Tools Blog Network
Sometimes it can be hard to keep up with all the top content across our many developer blogs. This makes sense, given that we have thousands of blogs! We want to make it easier for you to find and subscribe to the topics you’re interested in. Today we’re introducing the Developer Tools blog network, which connects the top Microsoft developer blogs. You can see that as a member of network, this blog now contains a set of tabs at the top, which make it easy to discover and navigate to blogs in different topic areas: If you go to the Developer Tools blog network site itself, you will see an aggregate...
Visual Studio Dark Theme
As we’re closing in on the final designs for Visual Studio 11 I want to thank you again for your feedback. I want to pass along that we are still internalizing your feedback and actively working on the next Visual Studio 11 milestones. The purpose of this post is to follow up on a common request relating to the earlier RC preview post. The request was for more information on the Visual Studio 11 dark theme. Leading up to our being engineering complete for RC we focused most of our design attention on optimizing the light theme experience, because that’s what our telemetry indicates the majority of y...
Visual Studio 11 Performance: Improvements in Typing and Editing Responsiveness
After the beta release, we published several posts on the performance improvements in Visual Studio 11. Since the beta release, we have made a number of additional enhancements, continuing our quest to improve the performance of Visual Studio. The performance work done between beta and the upcoming RC was substantial and covered many aspects of the product including XAML (compiler, loading documents, and the design surface), C++, TLM, Debugging and the list goes on. We plan to blog about a few examples. In this post we’ll cover typing responsiveness, and in the next post we’ll cover the Toolbox – both of which ar...
A look ahead at the Visual Studio 11 product lineup and platform support
Today, we want to share the final product lineup and specifications you can expect to see for the next release of Visual Studio. This also includes system requirements and platform you can develop for with Visual Studio 11. Product Lineup In addition to the product line up announced previously we will also be releasing Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone as part the Visual Studio family. Visual Studio 11 Express products are designed to be simple and easy for building modern applications on the latest Microsoft platforms, including Windows 8, Windows Phone, Windows Azure and for the Web. Express products su...
Visual Studio 11 User Interface Updates Coming in RC
With the release of Visual Studio 11 Beta back in February of this year, we introduced changes to the user experience based on two core design principles, the first being to give you more space for your content and the second being to draw more focus to that content. Since the debut of these changes there’s been significant community response and feedback. We’ve taken this feedback and based on what we heard have made a number of changes planned for Visual Studio 11 RC. I want to thank you for your continued feedback through this blog, and also through the various other community channels - please keep it coming....
Improving Find & Replace in Visual Studio 11 Beta
In our previous blog post, we introduced the new Find control we are building in Visual Studio. Our goal was to streamline and modernize the vast array of Find experiences and provide a lightweight mechanism to search within documents. With the huge number of responses we received from the Developer Preview, we knew that our top priority for the Beta release was improving the quality of Find. Since the Developer Preview release, we have fixed a large number of customer reported bugs, including replace in selection not working, buttons being disabled in the find dialog, missing wrap alerts, match whole word not ...
JavaScript Debugging Enhancements
Visual Studio 11 Beta introduces a first class JavaScript development experience and provides a rich toolset for developing Windows Metro style apps. Debugging is a crucial part of that toolset. In this post I am going to focus on just some of the new scenarios and enhancements we’ve added to JavaScript debugging experience for this release. First chance exceptions In previous versions of Visual Studio you could only break on unhandled exceptions when debugging JavaScript code. Now, for a given exception type, there is an option to break on exception whenever it is thrown. This is done by enabling the correspon...
Improving how we update Visual Studio
A common piece of feedback we’ve gotten is to make it easier to find and acquire bug fixes and updates – basically, how we can bring more improvements to more customers, more promptly, and more easily. As you can imagine, there are many factors to balance here, ranging from the kinds of updates we should offer, how frequently we should offer them, and how exactly VS should tell you something is available. To help frame our thinking, we looked at a lot of updating mechanisms for the kinds of things that work and what doesn't work – ranging from technologies like Windows Update through to the update mechanism we ha...