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
Nov 11, 2025
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Visual Studio 2026 is here: faster, smarter, and a hit with early adopters

Mads Kristensen

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...

AnnouncementVisual Studio 2026Release

Latest posts

Mar 21, 2023
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Streamlining your Debugging process with Breakpoint Groups

Harshada Hole

Have you ever had a situation when you are debugging a complex scenario with a huge list of breakpoints, and you find yourself scrolling and tapping in the breakpoints windows to disable/enable them individually and repetitively? Then the new Breakpoint Groups feature in Visual Studio may be the answer for you. This feature will allow you to create named breakpoint groups with any number of breakpoints in them. This provides a way to customize the breakpoint configuration and toggle breakpoints individually or in combination making debugging, testing, and troubleshooting faster and more effective. Breakpoin...

Mar 20, 2023
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Upgrading from IntelliCode custom team completions models to deep learning.

Aaron Yim

TL;DR – A deep learning model will now help provide starred completions for custom methods in the IntelliSense list. All users of Visual Studio 2022 will receive this improvement automatically. With original IntelliCode, a custom trained model was previously useful for ranking custom methods in a user’s code. When IntelliCode first shipped in Visual Studio, it used a simple Markov-chain model to rank methods in the IntelliSense list. This model couldn’t rank custom methods that are specific to your code, so we enabled developers to train repository-associated team & personal models to rank custom methods sp...

Mar 16, 2023
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Help us investigate a new Welcome Experience in Visual Studio 17.6 Preview 2

Grace Taylor

A central theme across Visual Studio releases is 'get to code' quickly. Over the years, we’ve tried many approaches to accelerate start up, project selection or creation, and restoration of previous state. In Visual Studio 2019 we created the modal 'start window' experience that optimized for getting to the primary action most developers take when starting the shell. Since that release, there’s been mixed feedback. Much of the critical feedback revolved around the modality interruption when switching between solutions. That has led us to reconsider other options for "get to code." With your feedback in mind, w...

Mar 15, 2023
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Improving the Spell Checker

Dante Gagne

Welcome to our latest blog post about the spell checker feature in Visual Studio 17.6 preview 2! We're excited to share with you the latest improvements we've made to this feature, which was first introduced in the Visual Studio 17.5 preview releases for C#, C++, and markdown files. We've received an overwhelming amount of valuable feedback from developers like you, which has helped shape and refine this feature before its release to the release channel. If you're new to the spell checker feature, check out our earlier blog post for an introduction. Otherwise, let's dive into the exciting enhancements in V...

Mar 14, 2023
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Visual Studio 2022 v17.6 Preview 2 is now available

Marian Luparu

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...

Mar 9, 2023
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Visual Studio 2022 – 17.5 Performance Enhancements

Nayana Srikanth

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...

Mar 8, 2023
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Developing Accessible Apps with Visual Studio

Dante Gagne

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...

Mar 2, 2023
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Build Better Extensions with VisualStudio.Extensibility Preview 3!

Maia Kelner

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...

Mar 1, 2023
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GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2022

Mads Kristensen

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...