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
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...
Dev tunnels in Visual Studio for ASP.NET Core projects
In this blog post we will discuss the updates to the dev tunnels (port forwarding) experience in Visual Studio when working with ASP.NET Core projects. If you have read the previous posts here about these features, you’ll want to read this one as well because we have a lot of big changes in Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 2. You can download the latest preview at Visual Studio Preview (microsoft.com). We will cover those updates here, as well as the overall support since a lot has changed in this release. If you would like to view these updates in a video instead of reading a blog post, watch this video by Sayed....
Try out Visual Studio 2022 version 17.5 Preview 2
I’m excited to share today we released Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 2! Your feedback goes directly to the product team working to deliver you the best developer IDE. We welcome your feedback on Developer Community where we are always eager to hear your suggestions for new or existing features and learn about any bugs or issues via report a problem. This release is packed with new capabilities across the IDE, .NET, C++ and Setup. There is something in this release for everyone. Many of these tackle top asks you've voted for on Developer Community. Use the list below to jump straight to what matters most ...
What’s new in Visual Studio productivity
We often hear feedback from users like you that request smaller quality-of-life improvements in Visual Studio. While we can’t address every piece of feedback right away, we appreciate the time you spend providing it and hope you continue to share your thoughts on how to make Visual Studio even better. In today’s blog post, we’d like to share a handful of these enhancements that can help you improve your personal productivity. You’ll now find: You can start using all these features today in the latest release of Visual Studio: Timestamps in the output window When an operation takes m...