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
Copy with proper indentation
You want to share some code you’ve written with a colleague, so you select it in the editor and hit Ctrl+C to copy it. As you paste it in Outlook/Slack/Teams, you realize that the indentation levels are inconsistent due to your original selection. You must now either go back to Visual Studio and do a box selection and copy that, or manually fix the indentation issue in Outlook. You know this, yet you make this mistake almost every time. Sounds familiar? It usually happens because you start your selection without the leading indentation. But every subsequent line has it. The result looks something like this...
Support reminder for older versions of Visual Studio
We want to keep you secure when using Visual Studio. If you’re using an older version of Visual Studio, we have several reminders about upcoming events in the Visual Studio support lifecycle. First, if you’re using the Community Edition of Visual Studio 2017 or 2019, we recommend you upgrade to Visual Studio 2022 Community, our first 64-bit IDE which makes it easier to work with even bigger projects and more complex workloads. We’ve made several productivity improvements in this version. The stuff you do every day—like typing code and switching branches—feels more fluid and responsive. It provides built-in sup...
Visual Studio’s Azure Marketplace images now support Microsoft Dev Box
Over the last couple of years, we’ve expanded our Visual Studio VM image offerings for the Azure Marketplace. These images have proven to be popular not only for evaluating the latest Visual Studio releases, but also for jumpstarting developer environments in the cloud. In this post, we'll introduce new images optimized for running Visual Studio in standalone VM instances, with Azure Virtual Desktop, or the recently announced Microsoft Dev Box service. Visual Studio images ‘optimized’ for developers Historically, we’ve released all our Azure images as generation 1 VM images. Now that Azure support...
Comparing files in Visual Studio
As developers, we often need to compare two files to find the differences. Sometimes, even comparing the content of the clipboard with a file on disk. And again, sometimes comparing our local changes to previous versions from our Git commit history. There is no straightforward way in Visual Studio to do those things today, but in this month’s experiment we’re going to change that. Various editors and IDEs offer this feature today, but Visual Studio has required the use of extensions such as VS Diff to provide the feature. An interesting thing about the various implementations is that they offer slightly di...
Visual Studio for Mac 17.4 Preview 2.1 is now available
We are pleased to announce the second preview release of Visual Studio for Mac 17.4. This release has been focused on addressing feedback from customers and on improving the overall experience. If you are already using the Visual Studio for Mac Preview release, use the Visual Studio > Check for Updates… menu to update. If you aren't using it yet, download it now: This blog post summarizes the top changes in this release. You can check out the preview release notes to learn all about the changes we've made.  Single Click to Restart Debugging Customers have long asked for a convenient way to rest...
Now Introducing Arm64 Support for VS Extensions!
Back in June, we announced Arm64 Visual Studio 2022 application, the first version of Visual Studio that natively supports building and debugging Arm64 apps on Arm-based processors. Now, we’re excited to announce the extensions you write, and use, are supported in Arm64 VS! Adding Arm64 support to your new or existing extension Making your extension Arm64-compatible can be accomplished in three easy steps: For more details on making your extension arm64-compatible (especially for native extensions), check out the updated documentation on migrating extensions. Upload your n...
DataTable Visualizer Improvements
Your favorite DataTable visualizer has now got a makeover with all new improvements coming in 17.4 Preview 2. The DataTable visualizers will now support sorting, filtering, exporting, and theming like IEnumerable visualizer. The DataTable Visualizer allows you to view the contents of a DataTable, DataSet, DataView, or DataViewManager object. You can access this visualizer by clicking on the magnifying glass icon next to the Value for one of those objects in a debugger variables window or a DataTip. This debugger visualizer now enables you to find /compare/solve/investigate data queries...
Visual Studio 2022 17.4 Preview 2
We have released Visual Studio 2022 17.4 Preview 2. In this post we'll share details about features added since Preview 1. Feedback from developers like you during our preview cycle is so important for us to deliver a final product that meets your high expectations. We welcome your feedback in the threads to this post or through Developer Community. Please continue to share your suggestions for new features or improvements to existing ones and any bugs or issues via report a problem. We’ve addressed a number of your top-reported bugs in this release and added new features based on your suggestions in Devel...
It’s finally here. Bicep is in Visual Studio!
In less than two years, Bicep’s VS Code extension has grown from zero users to more than 15 thousand a month. In addition to the Bicep extension's success, millions of resources are now deployed with Bicep files via Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell. Our incredible community has not only shaped the suite of Bicep features we know and love today, but they also made it abundantly clear how important Visual Studio was to their daily workflow. We heard you, no more switching back and forth between editors! Bicep extension for Visual Studio is now available on Windows for version 17.3 and higher! This rele...