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
Visual Studio on an ultra-wide monitor
A growing number of Visual Studio customers use ultra-wide monitors today. Ultra-wide means wider than a traditional 16:9 widescreen display – usually 3440x1440 or larger resolution. They seem to be gaining popularity among developers and I’m curious how Visual Studio can use all this extra space. So, I asked people on Twitter to send me screenshots of their ultra-wide Visual Studio layouts. Based on those screenshots, I constructed some different layouts that you might find inspiration in for your own ultra-wide setup. 1. Making room for the app This layout has Visual Studio take up two thirds of the width...
Case Study: Double performance in under 30 minutes
Summary Recently I was converting some decompression code to C# so that we could use it cross platform and to aid in our team’s effort to migrate our new analysis process to .NET 6. After I got the initial implementation done with the simplest, cleanest code that I could, I proceeded to profile it to make sure I wasn’t doing anything silly. I want to go over my normal process for this and what I found. Spoiler, I got a 2x performance improvement with under 30 minutes of work. What is the code The code in question has 2 main components, and . The general structure of the code looks like so: D...
Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Release Candidate
On behalf of our whole team, I’m beyond excited to announce that the Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.0 Release Candidate (RC) is ready for you to download now and includes a go-live license that allows you to develop in production environments. A faster, more fluid IDE for everyone This release swaps out the front-end UI of the IDE with a fully native macOS UI, replacing our previous architecture that was made up of a combination of UI technologies. We also replaced the IDE’s backend by moving to run it on .NET 6. The combination of these two major changes results in a smoother UI experience. You’ll see t...
View .NET collections with the new IEnumerable Debugger Visualizer
While debugging .NET code, inspecting a large and complex collection object can be tedious and difficult. Hence, starting from Visual Studio 17.2. Preview 2, we are introducing a new Visualizer, which will help you view IEnumerable objects such as Arrays, List, etc. in a customized tabular view. The IEnumerable visualizer will display collections of objects in a table with a row per object and sortable columns for each field and property. IEnumerable Visualizer Visualize data with IEnumerable Visualizer The IEnumerable Visualizer is an extension to the existing Dataset Visualizer...
Introducing a New Way to Search Your Code and Visual Studio Features
All developers search within their code, in one way or another. Some might use code search to explore their code and understand how some components work; others might use code search to get to a very specific location they have in mind. Either way, as a developer yourself, sometimes this process of searching and finding a location might be frustrating and take you longer than you might want. Visual Studio 17.2 Preview 3 introduces a brand-new All-In-One search experience that merges the existing VS Search (Ctrl + Q) and Go To (Ctrl + T) to allow you to search both your code and Visual Studio features quicker and ...
Supercharge your Git experience in VS
Have you experienced delays when viewing your Git repository or branch history in Visual Studio? Have you run a network command like force-push and had to wait for the operation to complete? Your Git repository may be having performance issues due to its large size. We are happy to integrate a relatively new Git feature called the commit graph which leads to improving the performance of your Git operations and significantly improving performance in Visual Studio. Once you are on the latest preview version of Visual Studio (17.2 Preview 3 or later), Visual Studio will automatically show the foll...
Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 9
Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.0 Preview 9 is now available! In this release, the focus is on addressing top reported issues from prior preview releases. This work builds on top of earlier previews where we’ve moved the UI of the IDE to fully native macOS UI and migrated the IDE to run on top of .NET 6 (enabling native support of Apple’s M1 (arm64) processor. Get the latest release now by using the Visual Studio > Check for Updates… menu in the product, or download it directly: Top issues fixed in this release Thank you to everyone who’s reported issues so far. Here are some of the top customer-reported i...
CPU Usage Tool Improvements
With Visual Studio 2022, we have converted the CPU Usage tool in the Performance Profiler to the profiler’s new analysis engine. This new change provides the tool with better source resolution, incremental/cancelable symbol loading, a performance boost, and a new flame graph.
Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 8
Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.0 Preview 8 is now available! In this release, the focus is on addressing top reported issues from prior preview releases and driving forward to a high-quality GA (General Availability) release.