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
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...
Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.5 Preview
Yesterday we released the second Preview of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5 and we would love it if you would try it out and tell us what you think. We’ve polished up some features that were introduced with the first Preview, addressed some of the issues you’ve reported, and made improvements in the product's fundamentals such as performance, reliability, and productivity.
Webinar: Level-up Your Unity Games with Visual Studio, C#, and Azure Easy Tables
Join David Antognoli on Tuesday, November 7th at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC for our “Build Better Games with Unity and Microsoft Azure” webinar. He'll show you how to add an Azure cloud data store to your Unity games and create more immersive player experiences. With Visual Studio Tools for Unity, you get the best of both worlds. You create amazing games for desktop and mobile devices and use your existing C# skills and Visual Studio’s powerful code editing and debugging environment – on your Windows or Mac machine. The latest Unity versions allow you to program against .NET 4.6 and utilize C# 6 features, ma...
Open Sourcing the Java Debugger for Visual Studio Code
Since we first released our Java Debugger extension for Visual Studio Code on September 28, it quickly became the most trending extension of the month. And of course, lots of feedback and suggestions were submitted from our active developer community. You shared, we listened. In this quick follow up release, we’re open sourcing both our Java Debugger Extension as well as the backend Java Debug Server, along with publishing a few feature improvements and bug fixes. Please try our latest Java debugger extension and make Visual Studio Code a better place for Java developers together. No need to specify main class a...
Visual Studio Team Services notifications in Visual Studio IDE
In our earlier post “Continuous Delivery Tools Extension for Visual Studio 2017” , we introduced failure notifications for a single tracked Continuous Integration (CI) build on Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). In subsequent releases of the Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio extension, our notification model evolved, to provide notifications scoped to build events requested on behalf of accounts on your keychain and associated with the solution that’s currently open. Work Item notifications Getting key information about your projects in a timely and efficient manner, is essential to minimi...
Step-back while debugging with IntelliTrace
Have you ever stepped while debugging, realized that you’ve taken one step too far, and wished you could step back? Or, while stepping, saw a variable change in an unexpected way, and wish you could go back a step and see what its value was before? Now you can, all without having to restart debugging to recreate the state again! In Visual Studio Enterprise 2017 version 15.5 Preview, we are introducing IntelliTrace’s new “step-back” feature. IntelliTrace now automatically takes a snapshot of your application on each breakpoint and debugger step you take. This enables you to go back to previous breakpoints or st...
Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.5 Preview
Today we are releasing the first preview of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5. You can either download it, or if you already have Preview installed, you’ll receive a notification that the update is available. This latest preview contains new features, improvements to key fundamentals such as performance and productivity, and other enhancements to address customer feedback. Read the feature highlight summary below, and check out the Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5 Preview
Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.4 Released
Yesterday we released updates to several of our products: Visual Studio 2017 version 15.4, support for .NET Standard 2.0 in the Universal Windows Platform, and the release of Visual Studio for Mac version 7.2. This minor update contains new features and performance improvements as well as fixes for bugs reported by you. Some highlights are mentioned below, for the full feature list check out the Visual Studio 2017 version 15.4 Release notes.
7 Hidden Gems in Visual Studio 2017
I’ve been working on developer tooling for over 16 years, and I still love it when I find a new tip or trick that shaves seconds off a repetitive task. The set below are features that I see infrequently used but can save loads of time! Gem #1 - Expression Evaluator Format Specifiers The part of the debugger that processes the language being debugged is known as the expression evaluator (EE). A different expression evaluator is used for each language, though a default is selected if the language cannot be determined. The expression evaluators have some lesser-known features, and though they aren’t always standar...