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
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...
Hands on with Visual Studio for Mac
Visual Studio for Mac was released just under two months ago at Build 2017, and already we’ve seen tremendous growth in .NET developers working on the Mac. Visual Studio for Mac enables you to build native apps for macOS, native mobile apps for iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Android, using Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms; and web sites and services using ASP.NET Core. You can also use Unity to build cross-platform 3D games. To help new Visual Studio for Mac developers get started, we’ve created some hands-on labs to walk through some of its exciting new features. The first two labs are available today, for Unity game devel...
Take your web app to Azure
You’ve built your web app. It’s running, and getting good traffic. Now you need to move on to solving the ‘good problems’ to have. You want to scale your app to support more users, but only at peak times. Or you need better hardware and simply don’t want to manage that hardware… or software, or even the network. What if you just want to improve your app’s reliability? Any of these may be reasons to look at hosting your app in Azure. Azure gives you a variety of hosting options so you can balance cost, performance, and ease of management; and Visual Studio makes it simple to deploy and manage your apps in Azure. ...
Telerik UI for UWP – Free and Updated XAML Controls
In case you missed it, Progress Telerik UI for Universal Windows Platform by Progress was released as free and open-source earlier this year. With more than 22 XAML controls, this news has made it easier than ever before to start building UWP apps. Rather than needing to rewrite many complex XAML controls spanning user scenarios across data management, data visualization, navigation and more, you can use Telerik’s controls for free. To get right to it, check out the Downloading and Using the Controls section in this blog post . Not only that, if you need to make modifications to the code, you can simply fork thei...
What’s New and Improved with the SlowCheetah Extension
We are delighted to announce the latest release of the SlowCheetah extension for Visual Studio. For those who are new to SlowCheetah, it’s an extension that lets you easily add transforms that enable different app settings, connection strings and more for different build configurations. You can read more here. In this release, we’ve made several improvements we’re excited to share with you. Released from the Microsoft Repository For the first time, SlowCheetah is being released from the Microsoft repository and all future updates will be coming from this repository. If you have any issues or suggestions, please f...
Xamarin University’s free webinar series: Learn mobile development from experts
Starting June 1st, Xamarin University’s team of mobile experts – including special guest and author Charles Petzold – will host five new demo-packed webinars, designed to show you how to use Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin to deliver fully native mobile apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and more. Join a new topic every Thursday. Topics range from learning how to get the most out of Visual Studio 2017’s latest features to building cloud-connected games to adding intelligence with Azure Machine Learning. You will get the training, samples, and advice you need to ship amazing apps using Visual Studio and C#. Every se...
Committing with Confidence: Getting Code Quality Information at Commit Time
Many developers tell us that they are under pressure to deliver software on an ever-faster cadence. This pressure for increased speed makes building your software at high quality from the start even more important – you want to make sure that any commits you make to your codebase are at the right quality, to avoid costly remediation of errors later. Getting key information about your code’s quality at key moments such as commits and pull requests can help you meet quality goals without distracting you from creating the features your customers demand. We’re now providing that information at commit time in the late...