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
Large C# and VB solutions load significantly faster in 15.5 update
On average, 50 percent of all solutions opened by Visual Studio users open in ten seconds or less. However, large solutions can take longer to load because there are a lot of projects that Visual Studio needs to process. Over the last six months, we looked at ways to make solution load much faster, even for large solutions. We are happy to share that with update 15.5, Visual Studio 2017 loads C# and Visual Basic projects twice as fast as before. (C++ solution load was optimized earlier in Visual Studio 2017, as described here.) This video compares loading the Orchard Content Management System solution befor...
Managing Secrets Securely in the Cloud
You’ve probably heard some version of the story about a developer who mistakenly checked in his AWS S3 key to Github. He pulled the key within 5 minutes but still racked up a multi-thousand dollar bill from bots that crawl open source sites looking for secrets. As developers we all understand and care about keeping dev and production secrets safe but managing those secrets on your own or especially in a team can be cumbersome. We are pleased to announce several new features that together will make detecting secrets in code and working with secrets stored securely on Azure easier than it’s ever been before. ...
Test Experience Improvements
There have been several significant improvements to the test experience that range across Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team Services. These efforts involved frameworks and tooling for both .NET and C++, but all had a common goal: make testing with our developer tools a great experience. .NET Side-by-side Performance Comparison These improvements are best shown in a side-by-side comparison of Visual Studio 2017 15.4 and Visual Studio 2017 15.5 Preview 2 with the Real Time Test Discovery feature flag turned on. Wow! How did you get that performance?! The performance improvements are thanks to work in a ...
Spend more time working on the interesting stuff
There’s a reason that each day thousands of developers take advantage of the rich set of extensions offered by our growing family of VS and VSTS Partners and the broader VS community. Collectively these offerings can save you and your team time in many different ways, from helping find bugs faster, to making it easier to work with data, to helping create great UX. I’m excited to be here at Connect(); this week where our partners are announcing a slew of exciting new products and updates for developers in tandem with our own developer productivity announcements. Here's a quick overview of these updated and n...
Keep Your Skills Up to Date: New Training and Azure Resources
Finding better ways to upskill is a consistent topic that comes up when we talk to you about what’s top of mind. It’s no wonder when the one constant in our industry is change with new techniques, frameworks, tools, and languages emerging all the time. Developers by nature are extremely self-reliant when it comes to dealing with this change. Over 90% of the respondents on StackOverflow’s 2017 Developer Survey indicated that they were at least partially self-taught. Whether through coding boot camps, online courses, online forums/Q+A, or joining an OSS project, you are using a variety of ways to level up your s...
The Latest in Developer Productivity and App Experiences
Whatever the language or platform, developers want the same thing - to create app experiences that are high-quality, intelligent and personalized. Experiences that delight users and keep them engaged. To do that, we need tools that increase our productivity, so that we spend more time on what matters most to our app's success. At Connect(); 2017 we are showcasing new tools and services that demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to developer productivity and incredible app experiences. Visual Studio App Center – Build, Test, Deploy, Engage, Repeat. Today we announced the General Availability of Visual Studio App...
Run and Debug Java 9 in Visual Studio Code
In the past 3 weeks, we’ve continued to see a lot of people installing and trying our tools, reading our documents, and visiting our repository. We’ve also seen a number of new issues opened by the Java community. Thank you all for trying our tools and providing feedback, all of which is motivating us to make VS Code a better tool for Java developer. With our new 0.3.0 release, we have added a few new capabilities and addressed your top feedback. Java 9 Support Java 9 was officially out just weeks after the initial release of our debugger. To allow more and more developers to try the new version of Java with VS...
Visual Studio IDE extensions now published and managed at Marketplace
Consumers of Visual Studio IDE extensions visit Visual Studio Marketplace to discover and acquire extensions. But extension publishers visit Visual Studio Gallery to publish and manage their Visual Studio IDE extensions. Henceforth, extension publishing and management will also be in Marketplace. In this process, all extensions in Gallery will be automatically moved over to Marketplace. Marketplace now serves as a single place for extension publishers and consumers to publish, manage or acquire extensions. Benefits of publishers moving to Marketplace To publish and ma...
Run book Run! From physical paper to executable online books
Have you ever wanted to run the code samples while reading a book? Without having to first download the sample code, its runtime, and configure your environment so that everything is setup the way you need it? What if you could be reading a book, and immediately execute (and change!) the code without needing to install anything on your computer? What if you could do this without needing any software other than a modern web browser? Azure Notebooks makes it easy to read a book online and run and change the code samples all from just a modern web browser. Today, we’re delighted to announce that Jake VanderPlas’ Py...