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 Code Updates for Java Developers: Rename, Logpoints, TestNG and More
We're proud to announce an update to the Java Extension Pack, including new Language Support for Java(TM) by Red Hat, Debugger for Java, Maven, Java Test Runner and Java Dependency Viewer.
Get to code: How we designed the new Visual Studio start window
A month ago, we shared a sneak peek of the experienc, the blog post A preview of UX and UI changes, and mentioned the research and observation that we used as input into the design and development. This is the story about how we got there.
New Azure DevOps Work Item Experience in Visual Studio 2019
In previous versions of Visual Studio, the work item experience was centered around queries, which need to be created and managed to find the right work items. In Visual Studio 2019, we have removed queries and added a new view for work items centered at the developer. This allows the developer to quickly find the work they need and associate them to their pending changes. Removing the need for queries.
New Benefits in Visual Studio Subscriptions
With CAST Highlight, Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers can rapidly scan their application source code to identify the cloud readiness of their applications for migration to Microsoft Azure and monitor progress of their app both during and after a migration. Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers are eligible for two 90-day free licenses to the full-featured CloudPilot, while Visual Studio Professional subscribers can take advantage of one 30-day license to scan apps and databases of millions of lines of code in minutes.
New Preview label for Visual Studio extensions
Visual Studio extensions can now be marked with a Preview label which is shown very clearly on the Visual Studio Marketplace. This gives your customers clear expectations that this version could contain issues as you are actively developing new features. Learn how to enable the Preview label here.
Visual Studio Live Share for real-time code reviews and interactive education
Collaborating with your team using Visual Studio Live Share keeps getting easier! Since making Live Share available for the public use at BUILD last May, we’ve heard so much great feedback from our users, which has helped guide us in continuing to build a tool that truly enables developers to collaborate in all the ways they need from the comfort of their favorite tools. Your feedback has pointed us towards new collaboration scenarios that we had not previously thought of (e.g. technical interviews and hackathons), as well helped us prioritize releasing some of the biggest feature requests and issues, like sharin...
Visual Studio IntelliCode supports more languages and learns from your code
At Build 2018, we announced Visual Studio IntelliCode, a set of AI-assisted capabilities that improve developer productivity. IntelliCode includes features like contextual IntelliSense code completion recommendations, code formatting, and style rule inference. IntelliCode has just received some major updates that make its context-sensitive AI-assisted IntelliSense recommendations even better. You can download the updated IntelliCode Extension for Visual Studio and IntelliCode Extension for Visual Studio Code today! The Visual Studio extension already works with the newly-release Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1. ...
Making every developer more productive with Visual Studio 2019
Today, in the Microsoft Connect(); 2018 keynote, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1. This is the first preview of the next major version of Visual Studio. In this Preview, we’ve focused on a few key areas, such as making it faster to open and work with projects stored in git repositories, improving IntelliSense with Artificial Intelligence (AI) (a feature we call Visual Studio IntelliCode), and making it easier to collaborate with your teammates by integrating Live Share. With each preview, we’ll be adding capabilities, improving performance, and refining the user experience,...
Qubits in Q#
How should qubits be represented in a quantum programming language? In the quantum circuit model, a quantum computation is represented as a sequence of operations, sometimes known as gates, applied to a set of qubits. This leads to pictures such as: In this picture, each horizontal line is a qubit, each box is an operation, and time flows from left to right. When we want to design a programming language to express a quantum computation, the question naturally arises of whether qubits should be represented in the language, and if so, how. In the most naive model of such a picture, there would be a software en...