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
Surround selection experiment
You want to quickly select some text and surround it with quotation marks. So, you select your text and hit the quotation mark key on your keyboard, only to find that the selected text now has been replaced by a single “. What you hoped would happen was that the selected text would be surrounded by an opening and closing quotation mark like in the animation below. Let’s do something to fix this. In this experiment, we want to test if we can create a general feature for all languages that makes it easy to surround the selection. In fact, multiple developers have requested this feature, so remember to vote f...
Visual Studio UI Refresh
Microsoft Fluent design language provides a unified framework to create and deliver more productive, consistent, and accessible applications. The Fluent design principles have been applied across familiar products like Microsoft 365 and we’ve been using those principles in the IDE to make targeted improvements to real problems. We’re excited to share these early designs so we can incorporate your feedback into making Visual Studio the best IDE for developers. We’ve created a new Developer Community Ticket tracking the improvements we’ve made to the command shelf, menus, tool window chrome, and document tabs w...
Web API development in Visual Studio 2022
In Visual Studio 2022 one of the main scenarios for web developers is creating Web APIs with ASP.NET Core. In the latest preview of Visual Studio 2022, 17.6, we have added a number of updates to be more efficient when developing APIs. In this post we will go over a sample scenario of developing a new API from scratch and point out the new features along the way. To get started download the latest preview of Visual Studio 2022 with the link below. Some of the new features that we will cover in this post include. In this post we are going to show a full end-to-end for starting with a new...
Exploring JavaScript and TypeScript Development in Visual Studio
Over the last 12 months, we made many improvements to the JavaScript and TypeScript developer experience in Visual Studio so that you can run both your front-end and back-end together within one click in one place. You might have seen the updates but in this blog post we will detail the new and improved features now available when working with JavaScript and TypeScript in Visual Studio. We will focus mainly on the productivity improvements including the JavaScript and TypeScript project type, project templates, code editing, dependency management and compatibility with the VS Code debugging. All the featur...
Improving the Syntax Highlighting of JavaScript in Visual Studio
Syntax highlighting, aka colorization, is one of Visual Studio's essential features; it uses colors and styles to help guide our brains when reading code. Following this Developer Community suggestion, we decided to work on improving the JavaScript and TypeScript experience! Starting from 17.6 we improved existing colorization and expanded it to new areas including control keywords, strings in tags, escape characters, JSDocs, and more. This post walks you through these changes and how you can configure and personalize your own! Overview Syntax highlighting is a Visual Studio feature that dif...
Git Tooling Preview Features to Enhance Productivity
We’re excited to share productivity and quality of life improvements available to the Git experience in Visual Studio version 17.6 Preview 2. Download the latest Visual Studio Preview and watch our recent Visual Studio Toolbox Live session to check out the following new Git features. Improved Search for Related GitHub Issues and Azure DevOps Work Items During this release, we’ve improved on the Issues and Work Items integration in the commit message we introduced in 17.6 preview 1. You now get better search results when querying for items that you haven't updated recently. You also can view items that...
Improving Visual Studio performance with the new Instrumentation Tool
Summary With the release of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6 we are shipping our new and improved Instrumentation Tool in the Performance Profiler. Unlike the CPU Usage tool, the Instrumentation tool gives exact timing and call counts which can be super useful in spotting blocked time and average function time. To show off the tool let’s use it to improve performance in Visual Studio. Wait, I thought Visual Studio already had an Instrumentation tool? If you were thinking, “Doesn't Visual Studio already have an Instrumentation Tool” then you were thinking right! So, what’s… new? Well, a whole list of things ...
Visual Studio Toolbox: Debug Threads & Tasks with Parallel Stacks
The Visual Studio Toolbox show helps you become a more productive developer by focusing on tooling in and out of Visual Studio. Our latest episodes of VS Toolbox (available both on Learn and YouTube) feature Mark Downie and Ramkumar Ramesh from the Visual Studio Diagnostics team. They demonstrate how you can use the Threads and Tasks views of the Parallel Stacks window in VS 2022 to debug your multithreaded applications. When debugging multithreaded applications, understanding the relationship between threads is important for properly designating and negotiating resources between them. In the Debug...
Visual Studio Toolbox: Integrated C++ Game Development
The Visual Studio Toolbox show helps you become a more productive developer by focusing on tooling both in and outside of Visual Studio. The show is available both on Learn and YouTube. Our latest episode features C++ program manager David Li, who shows how you can use the new Unreal Engine Integrations in Visual Studio 2022 17.5 to be more productive and build games faster with C++ and the Unreal Engine. David first talks about how Visual Studio helps you avoid the losing your focus by having to bounce back and forth between environments. He then shows how to install the Unreal Engine extensions and take adva...