Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
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...
Get your developer news
Staying up to date with relevant news about your tech stack and virtual events is not always easy. There are lots of different sources and seeking out the information can be time-consuming. To help get you the information you need, we’re experimenting with bringing back Developer News inside Visual Studio – this time with some refreshing updates. A lot of you missed the Developer News feed on the old Start Page in Visual Studio 2017 and earlier, and you’ve been busy voting for us to bring it back. Your reasons were many. Some stated they missed their mornings with coffee and the news before diving into cod...
Building a new JavaScript linting experience in Visual Studio
Available today in the 17.4 public release, Visual Studio has revamped its ESLint support! The new linting experience includes: But the main purpose of this post is not to list all of the cool things that the new linting service provides, but to tell you a little bit about the story behind it. I joined Microsoft at the beginning of 2022, and as an eager software engineer on the fantastic TypeScript tooling team, I was curious about what my first large project might be. It all started when adding support for the latest version of ESLint, the popular JavaScript linter. ESLint 8 had a few...