Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
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...
Visual Studio’s IntelliSense list can now steer GitHub Copilot code completions.
TL:DR GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio’s built-in AI assistance features are now better together. With the latest version of GitHub Copilot, changing your selection in Visual Studio's IntelliSense list steers the GitHub Copilot with additional context about your code, so you can easily explore the single and multi-line code completions to get just the code you need. Press TAB to accept the IntelliSense member, then TAB again to accept the Copilot prediction. With the latest release (version 1.84+), Copilot predictions are not only visible when the IntelliSense list when the IntelliSense is open, but your In...
Announcing C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code
We are thrilled to announce the preview release of C# Dev Kit, a new Visual Studio Code extension that brings an improved editor-first C# development experience to Linux, macOS, and Windows. The C# Dev Kit is designed to enhance your C# productivity when you’re working in VS Code. It works together with the C# extension, which has been updated to be powered by a new fully open-source Language Server Protocol (LSP) host, creating a performant, extensible, and flexible tooling environment that easily integrates new experiences into C# for VS Code. The source repo for this extension is in the process of being mig...
What’s New in SSDT 17.6: Ledger, Performance, Copilot
We are delighted to announce the new release of SQL Server Developer Tools for Visual Studio 17.6 released on May 16th, 2023. The major focus areas for this release are: SQL Server Developer Tools (SSDT) is a database tool within Visual Studio that lets users develop, build, test and publish their databases from a source-controlled project. It lets the users start from scratch with a new Database Project or import an existing database with a few clicks. SSDT is not available as a standalone installer but comes in the package with Visual Studio. We have added support to SQL Server 2022 ...
Iterating on your Welcome Experience feedback
One of Visual Studio’s goals is to help you quickly ‘get to code.’ We’ve recently experimented with Welcome Experience in Preview that helps you get to the code and tasks that you care about, right within the Visual Studio shell. Take a look at the original Welcome Experience design and its motivations in the previous blog post. Developers like you shared a lot of great feedback for that experience, so we’ve iterated once more. Read on to learn about the design and functionality changes we made to the Welcome Experience. To give this experience a try, please install the latest Visual Studio Preview build: ...