Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Introducing Visual Studio 17.10 – Preview 2 is Here!
We hope you all enjoyed the new and updated features that came with our first preview of Visual Studio 17.10, and now we have even more to share! This release brings additional tools to help you improve your code reviews with Copilot, diagnostics improvements, as well as additional Extensibility and WinForms enhancements. Browse this list of updates and let us know which of these enhancements is your favorite: To explore the full list of improvements, you can read the Visual Studio 2022 17.10 Preview 2 Release Notes, and we always appreciate your feedback through Developer Community: report any bugs or prob...
Visual Studio 2022 Version 17.9: A Comprehensive Update for C++ Developers
Visual Studio 2022 version 17.9 introduces a host of new features and improvements for C++ developers. Now, you can use the Memory Layout feature to visualize the memory layout of your classes, structs, and unions directly in the editor. Additionally, the #include Diagnostics feature provides insights into the frequency of element usage from an included file, as well as the impact of each #include directive on the build time of the file you’re currently editing. This information is conveniently displayed within your editor for easy reference. For Unreal Engine developers, the consistency and accuracy of Inte...
Visual Studio Subscriptions – A Product Manager’s Journey
I stared at my Visual Studio Subscriptions portal with a somewhat blank distance in my eyes as a feeling of inadequacy spread like the misty rains I’ve experienced in the Pacific Northwest. If you haven't been here, they are the kind that slowly permeate clothes with the intent of educating one on the difference between waterproof and water resistant. In this moment, I slowly understood I was portal resistant. I was new to the Visual Studio Subscriptions team, so I was going to have to become very familiar with the headings and tiles in front of me. This was my product, and I was going to be the voice of t...
Code coverage features in Visual Studio Enterprise
By using code coverage, you can find out where your testing needs improvement and make your software more robust and dependable. In this post, we will introduce the new features that we introduced to the Code Coverage Results window in Visual Studio Enterprise 2022. These features are: These features are not available in Professional or Community editions of Visual Studio. Support of additional report formats We now support additional formats for coverage reports. The formats that are supported are as follows: A coverage report can also be changed to other formats t...
WinForms Designer Selection for 32-bit .NET Framework Projects
Visual Studio 2022’s transition to a 64-bit architecture, driven by customer feedback across the full range of Visual Studio developers, marked a pivotal step towards enhancing the development experience. As Klaus Loffelmann describes in his blog post, this transition enhances overall performance and responsiveness, particularly when working with resource-intensive tasks and large codebases. However, this evolution brings with it a notable challenge for some .NET Framework projects using the Windows Forms designer in Visual Studio 2022. The challenge lies in the inability to design Forms in .NET Framework pro...
Visual Studio’s Full Year in Review (2023)
In 2023, we added many new features, fixes, and improvements to Visual Studio 2022 to make your coding experience more productive, enjoyable, and accessible. This blog post looks back at all the notable enhancements that shipped in 2023 for Visual Studio 2022. Here are the recaps for the year: For more details, you can check out the links to the original blog posts and the Developer Community suggestions that inspired these features. Thank you for being a part of the Visual Studio family! All of these features and more are now available on the recently released ...
A Year of C++ Game Development Improvements in Visual Studio
Game development is evolving rapidly and keeping up with the latest trends is crucial. I’m thrilled that David Li took the time to highlight all the improvements added to Visual Studio for game developers during 2023. Check out his blog here. The Unreal Engine integrations are where my eyes jumped to first. There is now an Unreal Engine log viewer, macro auto-formatter, naming convention checker, blueprint reference and asset inspector, test adaptor, and more, directly in Visual Studio. There is also an exciting image watch extension for UE projects that helps you view in-memory bitmaps while debugging C++ co...
Using Copilot Chat with C++ in Visual Studio: Generate code, fix functions, and more..
GitHub Copilot Chat is now available in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code for users with an active subscription. Copilot Chat is an AI pair-programmer that allows you to speak in natural language through the chat interface to accomplish programming tasks such as understanding sections of code, generating test cases, and generating code. We have just published a blog post that focuses on tips for using Copilot Chat functionality in Visual Studio with your C++ code. You can read more details as we walk through an example C++ repo here in our C++ team blog post. Download GitHub Copilot Chat To learn...
A Streamlined Extension Manager comes to Visual Studio 17.9
Over the last year, we’ve been building a better Extension Manager for Visual Studio that makes it easier for you to find and install great extensions. Along the way, we’ve invited Visual Studio Preview users to try out the new design and share their feedback with us. Using all that amazing feedback, we added features, made improvements, and fixed bugs. With the official release of Visual Studio 17.9, we’re ready to make the new Extension Manager available to everyone as a preview feature! The new Extension Manager design This design is all about maximizing space for the content you care about w...