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
Too many tabs open? No problem!
When you have lots of tabs open in Visual Studio, your horizontal screen resolution determines how many will fit the Tab Well. The remaining document tabs won’t be shown unless you enable multi-row tabs. But what if you don’t want to lose the coding space multi-row tabs take up, and still need an easier way to get an overview of all your open documents? Here’s how we might fix it and we need your help! You might already be familiar with the experience of hovering over tabs and using the mouse wheel to scroll through them in some browsers and other applications. The Custom Document Well extension brought th...
Introducing a powerful new Extension Manager
The Visual Studio Marketplace is filled with incredible extensions that let you customize your IDE, boost your productivity, and integrate with your other development tools. We’ve heard feedback from developers like you that it can be difficult to find important information like ratings and full-length descriptions when browsing the Marketplace with the Extension Manager. Starting with Visual Studio 17.7 Preview 3, you can now enable a preview of our modernized Extension Manager that highlights extension details and helps you more easily discover the extensions you’ll love. We’re excited for you to try it and ...
Announcing the .NET MAUI extension for Visual Studio Code
Last month, we released the first preview of C# Dev Kit, a lightweight, editor-first experience that augments your C# development in Visual Studio Code with a Solution Explorer, native Test Explorer, AI-powered code authoring, and more. Today, we’re excited to announce the first preview of the .NET MAUI extension, which, paired with C# Dev Kit, gives you the tools you need to develop your cross-platform .NET mobile and desktop apps with VS Code on Windows, macOS, and Linux. You can try out the .NET MAUI extension today – let us know what you think! The .NET MAUI extension lets you develop and debug y...
Get the most from Visual Studio with Microsoft Dev Box–now generally available
Today, we’re excited to announce that Microsoft Dev Box is now generally available. Below we’ll highlight a few significant features of Dev Box for Visual Studio users. Read the announcement blog to learn more about our journey to Microsoft Dev Box and what the service means for Visual Studio subscribers. Last month at the Build conference, we announced several new integrations between Visual Studio and Microsoft Dev Box. These integrations are designed to deliver the best Visual Studio experience possible, making Dev Box the go-to workstation for developers using Visual Studio. These features are focused o...
Visual Studio Toolbox: Accelerate your builds of SDK-style .NET projects
The Visual Studio Toolbox show helps you become a more productive developer by focusing on tooling in and out of Visual Studio. Our latest episode of VS Toolbox (available both on Learn and YouTube) features Drew Noakes from the .NET team. He demonstrates how you can dramatically reduce build times for SDK-style .NET projects. What is build acceleration? Build acceleration for .NET SDK style projects is an opt-in feature that directs Visual Studio to only build projects that had modifications while skipping projects that were unchanged. Enabling Build Acceleration can reduce incremental build times by up to 80...
Announcing Create a Pull Request in Visual Studio
We heard from you that you can do 90% of your development workflow in Visual Studio, but then need to rely on the web to create your pull requests. We're continually bringing productivity enhancements to Visual Studio and are excited to announce that as of 17.7 preview 2 release. You can now create a pull request without leaving the development environment. Creating a Pull Request We’ve been working on integrating more GitHub and Azure DevOps features into the git tooling to supercharge your productivity and collaboration. We know pull requests are highly utilized for code review in both open sour...
Configure Visual Studio policies using Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Intune)
Visual Studio global policies are now included in the Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Intune) settings catalog! It's easier for administrators to configure their organization’s devices now that the Visual Studio software policies are readily accessible in the Device Configuration Profile UI. A few months ago, we announced the release of Visual Studio Administrative Templates (ADMX files), which improved Visual Studio policy discoverability and usability. In order to use these ADMX files to deploy device configuration via Intune, an administrator had to take a couple of actions. First, they had to manually upload t...
Visual Studio 2022 17.7 Preview 2 is here!
Welcome to the Public Preview 2 of Visual Studio version 17.7! Hot on the heels of our recent Preview 1, we're thrilled to roll out another collection of upgrades tailored to empower developers like you. Preview 2 pushes the boundaries further, providing speed, productivity, and collaboration improvements for developers across different domains. Dive into this new wave of enhancements, spanning improved debugging capabilities, auto-decompilation for external .NET code, several C++ embedded and game development improvements, and more. Now you can even create your pull requests right within Visual Studio! Look...
Installing Visual Studio from an Internal Intranet Website
We’re happy to announce that starting with Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6, Visual Studio layouts are available to install from an internal intranet website! Enterprise customers have long been able to download a particular version of Visual Studio, host it on a private network file share, and make it available for their clients to install. This download cache of Visual Studio product files is commonly known as a layout.  There are a few reasons why a company would choose to use layouts. For example, the administrator may want control what version of the product their organization uses. Or sometimes, the cli...