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 2017 version 15.6, Visual Studio for Mac version 7.4 Released
Today, we released updates to both Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac. Start your download now while you browse the rest of this post: download Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6 or Visual Studio for Mac. We’ll trigger the update notification flag in the tools in the coming days.
Join me on March 2, 2018 for a Developer Tools AMA
A lot has happened since I last hosted a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) nearly two years ago. Our team launched Visual Studio for Mac in late 2016 and released it the following May. Shortly thereafter, we introduced live coding of mobile apps with .NET code with our Live Player. We made it easy to embed .NET into native applications with .NET Embedding and we have been working with Unity to deliver a great experience to their users. We completed Mono ports to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, made great progress in unifying Mono and .NET Core, shipped a prototype to run .NET in WebAssembly and brought CSS and Flex...
Your guide to Azure services for apps built with Xamarin
When talking about app development today, the cloud is almost always part of the conversation. While many developers have an idea of the benefits that cloud can offer them – scalability, ready-to-use functionality, and security, to name a few – it’s sometimes hard to figure out where to start for the specific scenario you have in mind. Luckily, our mobile developer tools docs team has you covered! Today, we’re happy to announce the availability of the “Mobile apps using Xamarin + Azure” poster. This poster serves as your one-stop guide to the most relevant cloud services that Azure has to offer to you as a mob...
Fine-tuning the notifications experience inside the Visual Studio IDE
Whether your team is small or large, staying on top of essential information in a timely and efficient manner is key in any successful project. In previous blog posts, we introduced new notification experiences that help you stay updated about team activities such as build failures and work item assignments without having to switch context outside of the Visual Studio IDE. New toast notifications With notifications, we saw an opportunity to improve your productivity by alerting you of important events, right on the IDE. We kicked-off our efforts by giving you the ability to be notified about the status of a singl...
Accessing Visual Studio Previews in Azure
In our most recent post, the Visual Studio team announced the availability of Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.6 Preview 4. Today, I’m excited to announce you can now access the latest Visual Studio previews in the Azure Marketplace. Just boot a virtual machine and off you go with the very latest features (standard VM charges will still apply). With this new offering, we’re putting the power of virtual machines to work for developers, making Visual Studio previews even easier to try. By accessing Visual Studio previews in Azure, you can get a new machine up and running in less than 10 minutes, and rest assured th...
Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.6 Preview 4
Today, we are excited to share the final Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6 feature preview, which builds upon earlier previews of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6. This preview contains new features, bug fixes, and other enhancements that address your feedback. The top highlights of this Preview are described in this blog post: an enhanced acquisition experience for updates, performance improvements, information about Visual Studio Live Share, better Build and Test Explorer tools, and various C++ improvements.
Hot Code Replacement for Java comes to Visual Studio Code
Hot code replacement (HCR), which doesn't require a restart, is a fast debugging technique in which the Java debugger transmits new class files over the debugging channel to another JVM. With this new feature in Visual Studio Code (VS Code), you can start a debugging session and change a Java file in your development environment, and the debugger will replace the code in the JVM running your code. This is the faster and easier way in Java to facilitate experimental development and to foster iterative trial-and-error coding. Below is an illustration of how you can use HCR with Debugger for Java in Visual Studio Co...
Xamarin University Presents: Ship better apps with Visual Studio App Center
At Microsoft Connect(); last November, we announced the general availability of Visual Studio App Center to help (Obj-C, Swift, Java, React Native, and Xamarin) developers quickly build, test, deploy, monitor, and improve their phone, tablet, desktop, and connected device apps with powerful, automated lifecycle services. As a .NET developer, you may already use the power of Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin to develop amazing apps in C#. Now, with Visual Studio App Center, you can easily tap into automated cloud services for every stage of your development process, so you get higher quality apps into your users' h...
Support for Continuous Delivery to Containers and TFVC in Visual Studio 15.6 Preview 2
We have an update for the Configure Continuous Delivery feature in Visual Studio. For Solutions with an ASP.NET or ASP.NET Core projects you can right click on the solution node and select “Configure Continuous Delivery…"with and without container support. You can always configure Continuous Delivery for solutions under source control in GitHub and VSTS Git repositories to App Service. With the release of Visual Studio 2017 15.6 Preview 2, you can also configure Continuous Delivery to Web App for Containers – App Service on Linux for solutions under source control in GitHub, VSTS Git repositories as well as TFVC...