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
Keyboard Shortcuts to Master Your Git Flow in Visual Studio
One popular way for users to optimize their efficiency is to leverage shortcuts to interact with the UI. With Git tasks, like Committing, Pulling, and Pushing being part of your daily workflow, learning how to avoid leaving the keyboard for the mouse can keep you in the zone. Checkout some other shortcuts on this printable keyboard shortcut cheatsheet for Visual Studio available for download. Try out the following Git keyboard workflows to see which shortcuts you can work into your daily practice. Not only can they help you be more productive and iterate quicker, but they can be easier to access for folks w...
Visual Studio Spell Checker Preview Now Available
We know developers like you take pride in your code! Many of the features in Visual Studio are designed to help you write the code you want. Visual Studio helps you ensure your code compiles and can even help with code styling. Now it can even make sure your spelling is accurate. Visual Studio 17.5 preview 3 introduces the first preview of the Spell Checker for C#, C++ and Markdown files. Getting Started The feature will be turned on automatically when working with any C#, C++ or Markdown file. Now, when you’re working with any document supported by the spell checker, Visual Studio will mark any words t...
Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 3 is here!
Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 3 is out and ready to install! This release continues to bring new productivity improvements for all developers and enhances many of the capabilities that shipped in 17.5 Preview 2. Several of these changes in this preview came from asks in the community and are highlighted below. These and many other threads on Developer community are full of discussions, design ideas. We’d love to hear your suggestions and learn about any bugs or issues using report a problem. General IDE Shell, Git, Editor, Debugger, and Diagnostics .NET C++ ...
New: Better search in Visual Studio
Whether you are looking for specific code files, classes, methods, or features and options in the IDE, finding them is not always easy. With multiple ways to search, how would you even know which one to choose? The new All-In-One Search combines code and feature search into the same UI and adds some extra power and productivity to the experience. To enable the new search experience, go to Tools > Options > Environment > Preview Features > New Visual Studio Search Experience. After doing that, and restarting Visual Studio, you’ll now see the new search button appear in the title bar, as shown in...
Debugging Encoded Text
Validating encoded strings is a basic but important part of our debugging workflow these days. I cannot count the number of times I have found myself looking at a URL-encoded string only to be suddenly unsure how percentage signs are supposed to be represented? I have been a web developer for years, but I can never remember what the URL-encoded version of a question mark might be, or how to encode or decode an equal sign from my memory. Encoding and decoding are also necessary when handling JSON Web Tokens (JWT) in authentication workflows, you may need to decode and verify claims data passed between parties. ...
Five shortcuts to boost your productivity
Taking full advantage of the Visual Studio editor features will make you a more productive developer. Any keyboard warrior will tell you that knowing the right shortcuts boosts that productivity even further. So, we’ve put together a short little video that demonstrates some useful shortcuts you can use while coding in Visual Studio. In the video, we cover the following shortcuts: There are many other features for editing your code. One way to discover them is to look in the Edit menu. Happy coding!
Write markdown without leaving Visual Studio
Markdown is a great solution when you want formatted code but don’t want to compromise easy readability. GitHub uses it for readme files, and we use it as our standard for Visual Studio documentation. If you’ve contributed to any open-source repo the odds are high that you’ve authored or edited at least one .md file in that repo somewhere. We’ve heard feedback from developers asking for a markdown editor in Visual Studio. With the recent preview of Visual Studio 17.5, we’ve brought markdown editing to the IDE! Now, when you have to make changes to markdown files in your project, you can do so without ever leav...
Adding new files just got a lot faster
Have you ever felt like the New Item Dialog slows you down when you want to quickly create an empty file or a simple C# class? Browsing through a list of templates is sometimes necessary, but wouldn’t it be great if Visual Studio could figure out which template you needed based only on the file name? If you answered yes, then you’ll want to use the new Quick Add Dialog! To get started being more productive with less clicking, download the latest preview version of Visual Studio: Try out the Quick Add experience Once you have the latest preview, give the new Quick Add feature a try by opening any solution...
Sticky Scroll now in preview
When working in code with long classes and methods that stretch beyond the vertical size of your screen, it can be difficult to keep track of which scope you’re working in. You may be editing a long method or exploring an unfamiliar codebase. In Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 2, we introduced Sticky Scroll to help you be more productive and save time when going through your codebase. Sticky Scroll provides immediate context to the code in which you’re working by keeping the relevant headers in your view. To start using Sticky Scroll today, update to the latest version of Visual Studio Preview and enable it in...