Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
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...
GitHub Copilot chat for Visual Studio 2022
GitHub Copilot has become a trusted AI-assisted pair programmer helping to auto-complete comments and code more productively. That’s just the beginning though! We’ve been working to evolve Copilot to move beyond code completion and provide enhanced AI assistance that you can access throughout your development lifecycle, whatever task you happen to be doing at the time. Copilot chat in Visual Studio We’re bringing fully integrated AI-powered Copilot chat experiences to Visual Studio. This is no ordinary chat! With tight integration in Visual Studio, it understands what you’re working on. That means it can quickl...
Streamlining your Debugging process with Breakpoint Groups
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...
Upgrading from IntelliCode custom team completions models to deep learning.
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...
Help us investigate a new Welcome Experience in Visual Studio 17.6 Preview 2
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...
Improving the Spell Checker
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...
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...