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

May 16, 2018
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Improving the responsiveness of critical scenarios by updating auto load behavior for extensions

Mads Kristensen

The Visual Studio team partners with extension authors to provide a productive development environment for users, who rely on a rich ecosystem of quality extensions. Today, we're introducing an update to extension auto load based on feedback from our community of developers, who need to quickly start Visual Studio and load their solution while deferring other functionality to load in the background. As part of ongoing performance efforts to guarantee a faster startup and solution load experience for all users, Visual Studio will change how auto loaded packages work during startup and solution load scenarios. P...

May 10, 2018
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Visual Studio and Unity 2018.1, even better together

Jb Evain

The Visual Studio team is excited about the Unity 2018.1 release: It's the start of a new release cycle packed with great new features like the Scriptable Render Pipeline and the C# Job System. You can read the full blog post by Unity for all the details on what’s new in the 2018.1 release. First and foremost, we're thrilled Unity chose Visual Studio as the default editor for both Windows and macOS so that developers get the same great editing and debugging experience in Visual Studio across PC and Mac. With this new release, Visual Studio for Mac is now included in the installer, instead of MonoDevelop on a M...

May 8, 2018
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Hyper-V Android emulator support

Visual Studio Team

Today, at Build 2018, we announced a preview of the Google Android emulator that’s compatible with Hyper-V, available on the Windows 10 April 2018 Update. This enables developers with Hyper-V enabled on their machines to use a hardware accelerated Android emulator, without needing to switch to Intel’s HAXM hypervisor. Amazing work was done by the Windows Hyper-V team, with help from the Xamarin team, to make to this happen. Today’s preview means you can use Google’s Android emulator side-by-side with other Hyper-V based technologies, including Hyper-V VMs, Docker tooling, the HoloLens emulator, and more. This me...

May 7, 2018
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Microsoft Build 2018: New releases for Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, .NET Core and Xamarin.Forms

Julia Liuson

At Microsoft Build this year we have many exciting announcements - .NET Core 2.1 RC, Future of Windows Desktop Development, Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7, Visual Studio for Mac version 7.5, Xamarin Forms 3.0 General Availability, Visual Studio Live Share Public Preview, and we introduce Visual Studio IntelliCode.

May 7, 2018
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Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7 and version 15.8 Preview 1

John Montgomery

Today at Build, we announced the release of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7 and the first preview of the next update, Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 Preview 1. If you would rather try these without installing them, check out the Visual Studio images in Azure that will be available soon. Before digging in, I’d like to call out other Visual Studio and .NET news: There are also two really interesting previews I’d call your attention to: We will publish blog entries on these soon, and as we do we’ll update this post with the links. There is a lot we have accomplished in this r...

May 7, 2018
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Visual Studio for Mac version 7.5 and beyond

Visual Studio Team

Last year at Build, we launched Visual Studio for Mac, our native macOS IDE for developers building cloud, web, and mobile applications using .NET. Updates have been rolling out at a steady pace ever since, and we're excited to announce the release of Visual Studio for Mac version 7.5. We have also continued to bring more Visual Studio 2017 code to the Mac. Our mission has always been to delight developers, and we have something for everyone in this release. You can get started by downloading the new release or updating your existing install to the latest build in the Stable channel. Here are some of the featu...

May 7, 2018
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Introducing Visual Studio IntelliCode

Amanda Silver

Learn how Visual Studio IntelliCode brings you next generation developer productivity via AI-assisted development, tailored to your code context. Try it out by downloading the experimental extension for Visual Studio 2017 that provides AI-powered IntelliSense.

May 2, 2018
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Azure Storage Explorer Generally Available

Visual Studio Team

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer. Storage Explorer provides easy management of Azure Storage accounts and contents, including Blobs, Files, Queues, and Table entities. For example, you can easily manage your Azure Virtual Machines disks as Blobs. Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Data Lake are also supported as preview features. General Availability Highlights Looking Ahead We're working on a variety of features, including: Next steps Download latest Storage Explorer today from Storage Explorer landing page. For any feedback, please report to Gi...

May 1, 2018
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Supporting Jetty for Java in Visual Studio Code

Xiaokai He

Eclipse Jetty is a popular web server and servlet container in Java community. We’ve released a new Jetty extension for Visual Studio Code that makes it easy to run and deploy WAR packages (Web Application aRchive), operate your Jetty servers, and interact with your application from within the editor. Today this extension includes the following features: Other Updates There are many additional new features added to our Java extension lineup for VS Code. Debugger for Java Java Test Runner Tomcat Maven P...