Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
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...
VisualStudio.Extensibility: Install extensions without restarting Visual Studio!
The new VisualStudio.Extensibility SDK helps you build extensions that run outside of the main IDE process for improved performance and reliability. With a focus on developer productivity, it features a modern, intuitive .NET Core-based API and solid, well-maintained documentation. This public preview release builds on our previous developer previews, and it brings with it the highly-requested ability to publish your new extensions in the Visual Studio Marketplace and share them with customers. We’ve introduced some great new features that will make it easier to configure your extensions, query the project sys...
Last Chance: Visual Studio LIVE! – Las Vegas
Less than 3 weeks to go! Join Us at Visual Studio LIVE! Las Vegas Are you at the forefront of driving business innovation using Visual Studio? With our room block running low, decide today to secure your spot at Visual Studio LIVE! Las Vegas. This event is your prime opportunity to enhance your skills and gain insights into new technologies, including intelligent apps and the integration of generative AI into your existing platforms. BONUS: Several Product Managers from Visual Studio, Azure Data, and GitHub will be attending and have set aside time for 1:1 customer meetings to meet you in person. Come to the ...
Introducing Visual Studio 17.10 – Preview 1 is Here!
We're excited to introduce the first preview of Visual Studio 17.10! This is where we get to show you what we've been working on and what we’re planning, and with feedback from the most active developer community on the planet, we get to deliver truly compelling products. During this release you’ll get to check out our latest enhancements and features designed to meet your productivity and game development needs. We’re especially eager to share the most recent updates to the GitHub Copilot Chat extension for Visual Studio. The preview is a great opportunity to dive into the exciting features we are building,...