Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Agent mode is now generally available with MCP support
Copilot agent mode is the next evolution in AI-assisted development—and it's now generally available in the Visual Studio June update. Agent mode turns GitHu...
Latest posts
Optimize your productivity with .NET in Visual Studio 2017
Visual Studio 2017 makes you more productive by getting you to your code fast and helping you write code quickly. With improvements to performance, navigation, and debugging as well as the additions of new refactorings, code style configuration/enforcement, and live unit testing, this release is chock full of advancements. This post shows you how to take full advantage of these features. Getting Started Visual Studio 2017 significantly cuts down the time it takes to install, open Visual Studio, and write code in your solution. The new Visual Studio installer gives you the freedom to pick and choose exactly what...
Redgate Data Tools in Visual Studio 2017
Today during the Visual Studio launch event, we announced that we’ve partnered with Redgate to include Redgate Data Tools in Visual Studio 2017. Redgate Data Tools includes three components that extend DevOps practices to SQL Server and Azure SQL databases and increase your productivity while doing database development. Here’s a brief overview of each of them: You can install Redgate Data Tools using the Visual Studio Installer through the Data storage and processing workload or through the Individual components tab. In this post, I’ll highlight how each of the Redgate Data Tools can improve your S...
New benefits for Visual Studio subscribers and Dev Essentials members
Today at the Visual Studio 2017 launch event we announced a set of new and updated benefits for our subscribers. If you missed any of the event or want to watch the on-demand trainings, check out the launch event page. If you’re a current Visual Studio subscriber or Dev Essentials program member activate your new benefits to get started right away.  To learn more about our developer subscriptions and programs visit the Visual Studio site. We’re pleased to announce the following new and updated benefits: Office365 Dev Account Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers now get multi-user access with 25-seat Office365 de...
Mobile Center: Xamarin support, detailed app analytics, and more
Since our announcement of the Visual Studio Mobile Center Preview at Connect();,  we’ve had an amazing response from the developer community. I’d like to thank the thousands of you who’ve created accounts, kicked the tires of our lifecycle services, and provided feedback to help us create the simplest, most effective way to build, test, deploy, and monitor mobile apps from a single service. As we head toward General Availability, we’ve incorporated that feedback into our roadmap, added new services, doubled down on existing services, and increased the size of our engineering team to make it all happen. Here’s an...
Extend your App Success with Visual Studio 2017 Launch Partners
Since the release of Visual Studio 2015, the ecosystem of technologies around Visual Studio has diversified and grown significantly. That is why the Visual Studio Partner Program now represents over 6,500 extensions and integrations across Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio Team Services, and Xamarin. This vibrant community of partners not only creates tools that help customize and enrich your development experience. The ecosystem of extensions available for Visual Studio 2017 today is quickly growing and, upon publishing this, we've passed 700 extensions! This number represents twice as many ...
Visual Studio 2017: Productivity, Performance, and Partners
Today we released Visual Studio 2017. Start your download and read on to learn more about some of the highlights of this release. For the complete list of changes in the release, check out the Visual Studio 2017 release notes. Some of the things I would like to highlight are: Fundamentals: Productivity and Performance Improved startup and improved project load. Multiple enhancements come together to make Visual Studio 2017 start up faster than Visual Studio 2015. Solution load times are shorter, and build performance is faster, particularly for C++ projects as Ankit Asthana wrote on the ...
Announcing Visual Studio 2017 General Availability… and more
Since we released the Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate, we’ve had nearly 700,000 downloads! We’ve been busy taking customer feedback and enhancing the user experience to deliver the most powerful and productive version of Visual Studio yet. We’ve also been fine-tuning the Visual Studio family of tools. Now, the day that we have been working toward is here.
Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2017
As we are getting set up to launch Visual Studio 2017 tomorrow, we wanted to let you know that we have released the Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2017. So, you’ll be able to hit the ground running with all your favorite productivity features. The Productivity Power Tools is a collection of extensions that improve the developer experience with Visual Studio IDE. Though not officially supported, they provide a great way to try out new features that we’re experimenting with. You can read more about the origins of Productivity Power Tools. What’s New? One of the key goals of this release was to break ea...
Avoid these six mobile development pitfalls
In our previous post in this series, we talked about the three shifts you need to make to set your mobile apps apart. As you implement your winning strategy, plan to tackle the six common challenges discussed below, ranging from meeting demand to post-release improvement. Discover how industry leaders tackle these issues in the e-book, Out-mobile the competition: Learn how to set your apps apart with mobile DevOps and the cloud. Challenge #1: Mounting demand for apps In response to the mobile explosion, enterprises have recognized the need to deliver exceptional mobile experiences to their business stakeholders,...