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
New Visual Studio Code Extensions for Java Developers: Maven, Tomcat, and Checkstyle
Alongside the release of Debugger for Java and Java Test Runner this week, we're welcoming a few new members to our Visual Studio Code Java Extension family. We think you'll find them helpful for your Java development when you’re dealing with maven, Tomcat or making sure your Java code to follow the standard styles. Maven Project Explorer Maven is extremely popular in the Java community and we’d like to make it even easier to use with Visual Studio Code. The new Maven Project Explorer extension: You can find more information on the extension home page. Tomcat For developers workin...
Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.6 Preview 2 and Visual Studio for Mac Version 7.4 Preview
We’re excited to start the new year off with great updates to the Visual Studio 2017 15.6 Preview for both Windows and Mac, and we hope that you will install and use it, and then tell us what you think. If you’re on a Windows machine, you can either install it or, if you already have it installed, click on the notification you’ll receive in the product informing you that the update is available. If you’re on a Mac, switch to the Visual Studio for Mac Beta updater channel to try out the new preview features. This second preview contains new features, bug fixes, and other enhancements that address your feedback. We...
Visual Studio for Mac as the default editor for Unity
Unity is a powerful solution to create games for a multitude of platforms, from mobiles to consoles, desktop and web games. Since Unity 5.2, Visual Studio and the Visual Studio Tools for Unity have been the default experience on Windows. When we released Visual Studio for Mac last year, Unity was among the first scenarios we supported out of the box. I’m happy to share that Unity will include Visual Studio for Mac as the default for macOS developers starting with version 2018.1. This means that everyone will be able to utilize the benefits of the .NET 4.6 scripting runtime upgrade in Unity (currently an exp...
Visual Studio Code Java Debugger Adding Step Filter and Expression Evaluation
Happy new year! We’d like to thank you all for using Visual Studio Code for your Java development as well as for sharing your feedback. Within just three months, we’ve published 5 releases for our Debugger for Java extension for Visual Studio Code and received 400K+ downloads. With our new 0.5.0 release, we’re adding two new exciting features: Expression Evaluation and Support Step Filters. Expression Evaluation The debugger now enables you to evaluate expressions in variable watch window as well as debug console at runtime. So now you can see the value of both the simple variables, single-line expressions, as ...
Visual Studio Updates for Office 365 APIs Tools
As we recently detailed on the Office Developer blog, we are making it simpler and easier for developers to connect to Office 365 through the Microsoft Graph. For Visual Studio developers currently using the Office 365 API Tools to create applications, you should plan to transition your apps to use Microsoft Graph to access Office 365 data directly. Call to Action You can use the Microsoft Graph Quick Start Guide to learn the quickest way to get started with Microsoft Graph for the platform of your choice. Or, you can use Office 365 Connected Services docs for Microsoft Graph if you have Visual ...
Connect(); 2017: SmartHotel360 Demo Apps and Architecture
Last month we hosted Microsoft Connect(); in New York City. Connect(); is a three-day, in-person and online developer event. If you missed it, no worries! You can watch our keynotes, sessions, and on-demand videos on Channel 9. For the past five months our keynote demo team worked on a new set of reference apps. We used most of these apps and Azure backend for our keynote demos. As every year, today we are delighted to share the availability of our newest reference sample apps and Azure backend: SmartHotel360 in GitHub. SmartHotel360 is a fictitious smart hospitality company showcasing the future of con...
Easily Create IoT Edge custom modules with Visual Studio Code
At the recent Connect(); 2017 in November, we announced public preview of Azure IoT Edge. Now you can bring the intelligence of the Cloud right to the IoT Edge as well as easily create and manage business logic for your devices. The new Azure IoT Edge extension for Visual Studio Code along with the updated Azure IoT Toolkit extension will make your IoT Edge developments a real pleasure, providing a set of functionalities including: Get Started with IoT Edge in Visual Studio Code First things first, let’s start by answering the obvious question - What is IoT Edge? What can it do and...
Sky’s the limit with Azure, ASP.NET Core, and Visual Studio for Mac
[Hello, we are looking to improve your experience on the Visual Studio Blog. It will be very helpful if you could share your feedback via this short survey that should take less than 2 minutes to fill out. Thanks!] Cloud services represent a huge leap in functionality, performance, and management simplicity for web apps, APIs, mobile backends, and more. To help you get started with cloud-based development in Visual Studio for Mac, today we're publishing two new hands-on labs: publishing your ASP.NET Core web app to Azure, and connecting your ASP.NET Core web app to Azure SQL Database. These two labs will he...
Share UI Code in any iOS and Android App with .NET Embedding
One of the most exciting announcements during this year’s Connect(); event was the ability to embed .NET libraries into existing iOS (Objective-C/Swift) and Android (Java) applications with .NET Embedding. This is great because you can start to share code between your iOS and Android applications, and you can also share the user interface between your apps when you combine .NET Embedding with Xamarin.Forms Native Forms. This means that you can leverage your existing investments and apps without having to re-write them from scratch to start adding cross-platform logic and UI. In fact, during the Connect(); keynote...