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
Accessibility improvements in Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3
In 2015, Satya Nadella updated the Microsoft mission statement to a single sentence. Our mission is to “Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” In 2016, Satya and Scott Guthrie looked at the directors in Visual Studio and asked how we’re honoring that mission with respect to the word ‘every’. While accessibility has always been a priority for Visual Studio, Satya wanted to know how much confidence we had in our own assessment.
Getting hands on with Visual Studio for Mac, containers, and serverless code in the cloud
We are looking to improve your experience on the Visual Studio Blog. It would be very helpful if you could share your feedback via this short survey that should take less than 2 minutes. Thanks! This week we released the second alpha of Visual Studio for Mac version 7.2, as well as some hands-on labs to try out some of the new features. Visual Studio for Mac 7.2 Alpha The alpha version of our next Visual Studio for Mac release includes new features such as: To try out these features, download Visual Studio for Mac and switch to the alpha channel in the IDE. More Hands-On Labs Our lates...
Visual Studio for Mac version 7.2 Alpha Preview
Today we’ve released a new alpha preview for Visual Studio for Mac in the alpha updater channel - our first preview for version 7.2. The major themes for this release are improving the performance and accessibility support. Trying the Latest Version If you’re already on the bleeding edge with the Alpha channel, simply check for updates within Visual Studio for Mac, or otherwise read the instructions on how to sign up for the Visual Studio for Mac Alpha updater channel. Preview Capabilities The Azure Functions support and IoT support were bundled as part of the IDE for our Build 2017 preview release. As we get rea...
CodePush joins Visual Studio Mobile Center
[Update 11/15/2017: Visual Studio Mobile Center is now Visual Studio App Center. Learn more on the announcement post from Connect(); 2017] About two years ago, a group of developers at Microsoft crafted a service for distributing Apache Cordova, React Native, and Windows Mobile updates to applications in the wild. They called it “CodePush.” Since then, mobile app developers have deployed thousands of releases to in-production apps – deploying quick bug fixes, feature improvements and content updates via the cloud. In a world where updates submitted through the app store can sometimes take days, these developer...
Samsung Releases 4th Preview of Visual Studio Tools for Tizen including support for .NET Core 2.0 Preview
Samsung has released the fourth preview of Visual Studio Tools for Tizen. Tizen is a Linux-based open source OS running on over 50 million Samsung devices including TVs, wearables, and mobile phones. Since announcing its collaboration with Microsoft on .NET Core and Xamarin.Forms projects last November, Samsung has steadily released preview versions of.NET support for Tizen with enriched features, such as supporting TV application development and various Visual Studio tools for Tizen. The new key features released with the fourth preview are based on Tizen 4.0 M1 as follows: The officia...
Hands on with Visual Studio for Mac – Part 2
Since the release of Visual Studio for Mac we’ve been amazed by the number of Mac developers using it to build native apps for Mac, iOS, and Android, using Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms; web sites and services using ASP.NET Core; and games using Unity. We’re also excited by the number of developers trying it for the first time, and we want to make it easy to get started – no matter what type of app you’re interested in building. To help, we’re creating hands-on labs for all sorts of developer scenarios. In my last post, I linked to hands-on labs for getting started with Unity 3D (Lab 1) and working with Internet o...
7++ reasons to move your C++ code to Visual Studio 2017
Whether you are a full-time or occasional C++ developer, whether you are using an older Visual Studio version or are considering using Visual Studio for the first time, this blog post is for you. In this post I share seven reasons why Visual Studio 2017 should be your first choice of IDE for C++ development (to quickly jump to each section of this blog post, follow the links below): For those of you that prefer to learn more about this topic in video format, check out the 7++ reasons to move your C++ code to Visual Studio 2017 BUILD breakout session. #1 Write modern, portabl...
Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.3 Preview
We’ve been working hard to polish up some features, address some of the issues you’ve reported, and make meaningful improvements in the product's fundamentals such as reliability, performance, and accessibility. A few of the notable highlights include - Continuous Delivery Tools can now automatically build and deploy NET or ASP.NET Core projects to Azure Web App Services, increased visibility on extensions’ impact on Visual Studio reliability, Lightweight solution load (LSL) in large C++ solutions.
7 lesser known hacks for debugging in Visual Studio
The Visual Studio debugger is a magical beast that can save you loads of time while finding and fixing issues in your application. It is chock-full of tools that can make debugging easier… if you know they exist, and where to find them! Let’s look at 7 lesser known goodies you can use to help you #SuperChargeYourDebugging. 1. Click to Set Next Statement Many of you may know about the context menu item Set Next Statement (Ctrl+Shift+F10) that moves the yellow arrow (the instruction pointer) to the target line of code. You may also know that you grab and drag the yellow arrow up and down in the gutter to move it. W...