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
Nov 11, 2025
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Visual Studio 2026 is here: faster, smarter, and a hit with early adopters

Mads Kristensen

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...

AnnouncementVisual Studio 2026Release

Latest posts

Jul 16, 2018
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Azure Service Fabric Mesh tools now available for Visual Studio 2017

Cristy Gonzalez

Azure Service Fabric is a market-tested distributed systems platform for running scalable and reliable applications on microservices and containers. Up until now, Service Fabric required you to create and manage the clusters and their nodes using virtual machine scale sets. With today’s announcement of Azure Service Fabric Mesh, you’ll be able to use Service Fabric without managing infrastructure such as VMs, storage, or networking. Additionally, we’ve released Service Fabric Mesh tooling in Visual Studio 2017 to help you build applications. Previously, you had to describe your Service Fabric applications with...

Jul 9, 2018
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Announcing the public preview of Azure Dev Spaces

Balan Subramanian

Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Dev Spaces, a cloud-native development experience for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), where you can work on your applications while always staying connected with the cloud and your team. Over the last year, we have spoken to many developers working in different languages and platforms who are exploring Kubernetes. They are excited about the opportunities it presents for them to build cloud-native applications with containers and microservices without having to do any infrastructure management or orchestration. We are also seeing enterprise teams migrat...

Jun 26, 2018
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Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 Preview 3

Christine Ruana

We're happy to share the highlights of the latest Visual Studio 2017 preview, which is now available for download, including - Productivity and Performance improvements, updated JavaScript and TypeScript tooling, right-click context menu productivity improvements, more C++ productivity improvements in IntelliSense, Code Analysis, and Just My Code debugging, Azure Development improvements, more Library Manager features, and Mobile Development improvements such as faster Android incremental builds and inclusion of Xamarin.Essentials to facilitate building native apps.

Jun 14, 2018
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Getting Started with Microsoft’s Python Developer Tools

Dan Taylor

Microsoft's teams have been working over the last few years to bring Python developer tools to the Azure cloud and our most popular developer tools: Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio. Python is one of the fastest growing languages, with both beginner and expert developers taking to it. What makes it attractive is its easy-to-learn semantics with powerful capabilities for a wide variety of applications from writing scripts, to building web services, to building machine learning models. In this post we’ll take a tour of Python Developer tools in Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Azure, and more. For more inform...

Jun 8, 2018
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Preview of Visual Studio Kubernetes Tools

Lisa Guthrie

Kubernetes is an open source system that is quickly emerging as the preferred container orchestration system for applications of all shapes and sizes, simplifying the deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers. It runs in a variety of environments, including on premises as well as in cloud providers, such as Microsoft’s own Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Here on the Visual Studio team, we are working on ways to better support developers who are building containerized applications that target Kubernetes. In talking to these developers, we’ve heard that it can be challenging to create Dockerf...

Jun 6, 2018
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What’s Next for Visual Studio

John Montgomery

Since we launched Visual Studio 2017 in March of that year, it has become our most popular Visual Studio release ever. Your feedback has helped our team publish seven updates since our initial GA, which have improved solution load performance, build performance, and unit test discovery performance. We’ve also made Visual Studio 2017 our most accessible releases ever, helping developers with low-vision or no-vision be more productive. Our team is focused on introducing features that make every developer more productive: better navigation features like “go to all” (Ctrl + ,), features to improve code quality lik...

May 31, 2018
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Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 Preview 2

Christine Ruana

We're happy to share the highlights of the latest Visual Studio 2017 preview, which is now available for download, including - Emulator and Designer improvements when developing mobile Android apps, Xamarin.Android support of Android P Developer Preview 1, C++ development improvements, ability to fine-tune solution load configuration settings to maximize performance, significant new functionality in the CPU Usage tool to help you profile your applications’ performance, improvements to make it easier to build and debug extensions.

May 30, 2018
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New Updates for Azure Development in Visual Studio

Cristy Gonzalez

With Microsoft Build 2018 in the books, we just released a series of updates to Visual Studio for Azure Development. This improves productivity and security for developers building and diagnosing web applications, containers and microservices. To help you make the most of these new advancements for developing in the Azure cloud, we've compiled a "best of" list announced at this year's event. Web App Development We improved Web publish by adding App Service Linux as a target. This allows you to build a .NET Core app and easily publish it to App Service running on native Linux, unlike today where you must build c...

May 24, 2018
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Snapshots on Exceptions while debugging with IntelliTrace

Deborah Chen

Have you ever encountered an exception in your application while debugging, and wanted to know exactly what the state of the app was at that point in time? With a new feature in IntelliTrace, you can! Learn how to use IntelliTrace's new snapshots on exceptions feature, which enables you to go back to a previous exception event and see the state of the application at the time the exception was thrown.