Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Latest posts
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...
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...