Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Visual Studio 2026 is here: faster, smarter, and a hit with early adopters
Dear developers, We’re thrilled to announce that Visual Studio 2026 is now generally available! This is a moment we’ve built side by side with you. Your feed...
Latest posts
Elevating Debugging with Auto-decompilation and External Sources
Visual Studio has been supporting external sources debugging and decompilation for some time now. However, with the release of Visual Studio 17.7, the debugger took a significant leap forward by introducing Auto-decompilation for .NET libraries making the external code debugging in Visual Studio much more streamlined and effortless. Its integrated decompiler, it decompiles external code in real-time and seamlessly incorporates it into the debugger as needed. In this article, we'll investigate the Auto-decompilation feature of Visual Studio, highlighting its significance in debugging and engineering external co...
Keep your casing with Case-preserving Find and Replace
The Visual Studio search experience is getting a new feature that allows users to find and replace text without having to worry about different casings. For example, a method parameter `catalogItemId` and object property `CatalogItemId` have the same name but different capitalization but should both be replaced by something like ‘productId’ with their respective casings. The feature has been requested by users who were looking for an easy way to find and replace text without having to worry about different casings in various forums, including Stack Overflow and Developer Community Case-Preserving Search &...
Visual Studio for Mac Retirement Announcement
Today we are announcing the retirement of the Visual Studio for Mac IDE. Visual Studio for Mac 17.6 will continue to be supported for another 12 months, until August 31st, 2024, with servicing updates for security issues and updated platforms from Apple. While the decision has been made to retire Visual Studio for Mac, we remain committed to our developers on Mac with alternatives like the recently announced C# Dev Kit for VS Code and other extensions that will allow you to take advantage of our ongoing investments in .NET development on a Mac. Developing Across OS Environments Informed by ongoing user feedback...
Learn about new and old VS tools on Visual Studio Toolbox!
Do you like watching videos to learn about new and existing Visual Studio features? Then you should check out the Visual Studio Toolbox show! Available on both Learn and YouTube, Visual Studio Toolbox is a show that helps you become a more productive developer in VS by highlighting tooling within the IDE and the wider Visual Studio family. Most of our guests are Visual Studio team members, giving you expert knowledge on features while also providing an inside look at how the features were developed. The show airs a mix of both prerecorded and live episodes, with the latter letting you ask your VS-related ques...
Working with images just got easier in Visual Studio
Any web, desktop, or mobile developer works with images often. You reference them from C#, HTML, XAML, CSS, C++, TypeScript, and even in code comments. Some images are local, and some exist online or on network shares, while others only exist as base64 encoded strings. We refer to them in numerous ways in code, but always as string values that don’t show us what the image looks like. It would be nice if those image references could show us the images too. The feature request An option to preview images when they are hovered has gotten some attention lately, and we think it sounds like a great idea. If you ...
Safely use secrets in HTTP requests in Visual Studio 2022
In the 17.8 Preview 1 version of Visual Studio 2022 we have updated the HTTP file editor to enable you to externalize variables to make testing your Web APIs across different environments easier. This update also includes support to handle secrets in a secure fashion. To access these new features, you’ll need to install 17.8 Preview 1, or later, which you can do with the link below. In previous releases if you wanted to use a variable in an HTTP file in Visual Studio, the variable would have to be defined directly in the HTTP file itself. This makes it more difficult to test different environments with the...
Simplified Code Refinement and Debugging with GitHub Copilot Chat
This March, we announced GitHub Copilot chat for Visual Studio 2022. With Chat, Copilot has moved beyond code completions, offering in-depth analysis and explanations of how code works. It supports the generation of unit tests, and even helps with proposed fixes to bugs, and explaining exceptions. By gathering useful context data from Visual Studio, Copilot Chat helps you form great questions to get useful answers. Using GitHub Copilot with Visual Studio gives you more time for creativity by spending less time on boilerplate manual tasks and diagnosis. Now, we’ve taken deep integration with Visual Studio a ste...
New in Visual Studio: Compare Files with Solution Explorer
Comparing code in different files is a common need for developers, yet it often disrupts the flow of your work. We've heard your feedback and are excited to introduce a new compare feature in Visual Studio. This feature enables you to compare code files directly within the Solution Explorer, eliminating the need for external tools and keeping you in your developer flow. Effortless Code Comparison with Two Options Recognizing that developers have different scenarios for comparing files, we've introduced two convenient ways to achieve the same goal: effortless code comparison to understand differences. 1. Comp...
Multi-Branch Graph Available for General Audiences
The power of version control comes alive when you can visualize your Git operations with the new multi-branch graph, available in 17.7 GA. In response to your feedback, we’ve delivered an improved graph experience. Track all the branches, commits, and merges that arise in your git workflows by viewing multiple branches at the same time. Leveraging the Multi-branch Graph Visualizing multiple branches empowers you to perform cross branch operations and makes it easy to understand the relationships between branches. In the past, you may have used tools like GitKraken, Sourcetree, or git log to visualize your r...