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
What’s Next for Visual Studio for Mac
Since it was released a little more than a year ago, Visual Studio 2017 for Mac has grown from being an IDE primarily focused on mobile application development using Xamarin to one that includes support for all major .NET cross-platform workloads including Xamarin, Unity, and .NET Core. Our aspiration with Visual Studio for Mac is to bring the Visual Studio experiences that developers have come to know and love on Windows to the MacOS and to provide an excellent IDE experience for all .NET cross-platform developers. Over the past year, we added several new capabilities to Visual Studio for Mac including .NET C...
Microsoft’s Developer Blogs are Getting an Update
Update: Launch is now scheduled for mid-November to ensure you have the best blog experience. We appreciate all of the feedback so far and we look forward to showing what we’ve been working on! In the coming days, we’ll be moving our developer blogs to a new platform with a modern, clean design and powerful features that will make it easy for you to discover and share great content. This week, you’ll see the Visual Studio, IoTDev, and Premier Developer blogs move to a new URL while additional developer blogs will transition over the coming weeks. You'll continue to receive all the information and news from ou...
Simplify extension development with PackageReference and the VSSDK meta package
Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 made it possible to use the PackageReference syntax to reference NuGet packages in Visual Studio Extensibility (VSIX) projects. This makes it much simpler to reason about NuGet packages and opens the door for having a complete meta package containing the entire VSSDK. Before using PackageReference, here’s what the References node looked like in a typical VSIX project: It contained a lot of references to Microsoft.VisualStudio.* packages. Those are the ones we call VSSDK packages because they each make up a piece of the entire public API of Visual Studio. Migrate to Packa...
Introducing ‘Suggest a Feature’ in Developer Community
Customer feedback is a critical input to help us improve Visual Studio. Up until two years ago, the Visual Studio customer feedback system left room for improvement – customers could use the “send a smile” feature in Visual Studio, but this would result in only coarse-grained feedback such as “I like this” or “I don’t like this.” The feedback we got through this UI then went into a database our team accessed, but didn’t leave an easy way for customers to see the feedback that other customers were giving so they could say, “I have that problem too!” More than that, the back-end system that gathered feedback was se...
Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac Support Updates
As we work to bring you Visual Studio 2019, our team will release the final update to Visual Studio 2017, version 15.9, in the coming months; you can try a preview of version 15.9 here. We’d love your feedback on this release as we finish it up; use Report-a-Problem to submit issues. Following our standard Visual Studio support policy, Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 will be designated as the “Service Pack”. Once version 15.9 ships, customers still using version 15.0.x (RTM) will have one year to update to version 15.9 to remain in a supported state. (Customers using versions 15.1 through 15.8 must update to t...
Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 Preview 3
Today, we are releasing the third preview of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9. You can download it here and share your feedback with our engineering teams. This release includes ARM64 support in UWP apps as well as improvements to Xamarin and TypeScript. Continue reading below for an overview the fixes and new features. If you’d like to see the full list, check out the release notes for more details. ARM64 Support for UWP Applications You can now build ARM64 UWP applications for all languages. If you create a new application, the ARM64 configuration will be included in the project by default. For existing applic...
How to upgrade extensions to support Visual Studio 2019
Recently, I’ve updated over 30 of my extensions to support Visual Studio 2019 (16.0). To make sure they work, I got my hands on a very early internal build of VS 2019 to test with (working on the Visual Studio team has its benefits). This upgrade process is one of the easiest I’ve ever experienced. I wanted to share my steps with you to show just how easy it is so you’ll know what to do once Visual Studio 2019 is released. Updates to .vsixmanifest We need to make a couple of updates to the .vsixmanifest file. First, we must update the supported VS version range. <InstallationTarget> Here’s a version ...
Getting started writing Visual Studio extensions
I’m often asked how to best learn to build Visual Studio extensions, so here is what I wished someone told me before I got started. Don’t skip the introduction It’s easy to create a new extensibility project in Visual Studio, but unless you understand the basics of how the extensibility system works, then you are setting yourself up for failure. The best introduction I know of is a session from //build 2016 and it is as relevant today as it was then. Know the resources Where do you get more information about the various aspects of the Visual Studio APIs you wish to use? Here are some very helpful website...
How can I pause my code in Visual Studio? Breakpoints FAQ
Have you ever found a bug in your code and wanted to pause code execution to inspect the problem? This blog post showcases the various kinds of breakpoints that can be used to accomplish this task in Visual Studio 2017.