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
Visual Studio 2022 v17.6 Preview 2 is now available
Preview 2 for Visual Studio 17.6 is now available! If you are a game developer, a mobile developer, or are interested in learning new tricks to better debug your code, check out this latest release. It’s as easy as upgrading your Preview channel in the Visual Studio installer. And if you haven’t activated your Preview channel for Visual Studio yet, click the button below to install Preview 2 now. You can also check out for the complete list of new experiences coming online for 17.6. Oh, and rest assured that Previews always install side-by-side with the officially supported Visual Studio releases, so you can a...
Visual Studio 2022 – 17.5 Performance Enhancements
We are excited to announce that Visual Studio 2022 17.5 offers a range of performance enhancements that significantly improve the speed and responsiveness of the product in the following main areas: You can download Visual Studio 2022 from the Visual Studio downloads page or upgrade your existing installation by following the Update Visual Studio page. Build Acceleration for .NET SDK style projects Build Acceleration for .NET SDK style projects are an opt-in feature that directs Visual Studio to only build projects that had modifications while skipping projects that were unch...
Developing Accessible Apps with Visual Studio
When your application has an accessibility issue, it means that some users will find it harder or impossible to use your application. This means that a percentage of your users are having a bad experience or simply can’t use your product. The implications are far reaching, because many countries have laws governing accessibility in applications for consumers, government, or educational use. Accessibility is as important as privacy or security, to ensure your application is usable by all developers and complies with legal standards. The Integrated Accessibility Checker That’s easier said than done, but Visual St...
Build Better Extensions with VisualStudio.Extensibility Preview 3!
Today, we’re very excited to announce the third public preview of VisualStudio.Extensibility, our new SDK for creating extensions for Visual Studio! The VisualStudio.Extensibility SDK focuses on extensions that run out-of-process from the IDE for improved performance and reliability, and it features a modern API that has been streamlined and carefully engineered to maximize developer productivity. This release builds on our first and second public previews, and it brings some big features like an API to query and modify project information and the ability to create incredible debugger visualizers. Pleas...
GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2022
GitHub Copilot uses OpenAI Codex to suggest code and entire functions in real-time right from your editor. Trained on billions of lines of public code, GitHub Copilot turns natural language prompts including comments and method names into coding suggestions across dozens of languages. In Visual Studio, Copilot acts as a pair-programmer making it more joyous to code – and increases your productivity at the same time. And an updated version of Copilot for Visual Studio was just released. It contains a lot of fixes, tweaks, and other improvements. Check out this demo video: Together with the built-in AI in...
Try Visual Studio 2022 v17.6 Preview 1
The first Preview for Visual Studio 2022 17.6 is now available! This release expands on the recently released 17.5 version of Visual Studio and aims at enhancing your productivity whether you’re a .NET developer, a game developer, and/or a C++ developer. Why should you try the latest preview? Because it’s like living in the future – you get to try all the capabilities that we’re actively working on for the upcoming 17.6 release, influence their development early by providing your suggestions and by reporting any problem you encounter. And you get to do that while reliably continuing your critical work, as Prev...
The fastest way to add files and folders
Your Visual Studio team is excited to announce the release of the highly anticipated "Quick Add Files & Folders" feature in Visual Studio version 17.5! This new feature is the fastest and most convenient way to add files and create folders within your projects. Based on the feedback from the Visual Studio Developer Community, Quick Add was requested and highly voted on, making it a top priority for our development team. Yes, your votes matter! The team has iterated on the early preview to bring you the most efficient and effective way to manage your files. Check out this video to learn more and then ...
Reference GitHub Issues and Pull Requests in Visual Studio
We’re excited to announce the preview release of linking GitHub Issues. With Visual Studio 2022 17.6 Preview 1 you can now mention your issues in the commit message box in the Git Changes window. Speed up your workflow by linking your related work items directly in Visual Studio. You can use the related items to get more context from the Git Repository window. Learn more about how to leverage this feature below. Reference Your Related Items Building on the existing Azure DevOps work item support, we’ve enabled the same experience with GitHub. To try it out: Get Access to Is...
Visual Studio 2022 can now Always Update on Close!
Do you want Visual Studio 2022 to always stay up to date with the latest goodness with little-to-no action from your end? Then look no further, because as of now, we support the ability to “Always Update on Close”! Starting with Visual Studio 2022 version 17.5, we’ve made it easier to apply available updates when Visual Studio closes if you’ve made a one-time configuration change in Visual Studio. You can find this option in the Tools > Options > Product Updates dialog. This setting is configurable on a per instance basis of Visual Studio 2022 and we highly encourage you to enable this feature to s...