Visual Studio Blog

The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team

Visual Studio Start Page: Through the ages

When we started planning the first truly integrated version of Visual Studio (prior to that Visual Studio was predominantly a collection of tools boxed together) we wanted to help developers get started with the new version. To do this we introduce a common start page for Visual Studio. Visual Studio.NET (image) Figure 1 Visual...

Designing pixel perfect layouts in Visual Studio 2013 and Blend

It’s a familiar scenario. You’re developing your application and you’ve got a design in mind. It may have come from a professional designer or a sketch on the back of a cocktail napkin, but you need to move from a concept to a working, implemented design. This can be easier said than done. When your design calls for the baseline of ...

Notifications in Visual Studio 2013

One of the benefits to having a connected IDE is that your environment can be kept up to date easily by presenting you with notifications of updates and relevant account information. Visual Studio will not only keep your environment up to date but also keep you in control of your preferred configurations. There are two main avenues for ...

Supercharged Styling: Quickly Finding and Setting a CSS Property in Blend

A core goal of Blend for Visual Studio is to make it fast and easy for developers who care about the quality of their markup to create professional looking apps. One of the many ways that the HTML Designer in Blend can speed up the CSS editing experience when developing Windows Store apps is by providing immediate visual feedback and enabling ...

Visual Studio 2013 RC available now!

Today, we announced that the Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate is now available for download on our Visual Studio product site. We are also excited to share that the Visual Studio 2013 Launch is on Nov 13th 2013. Save the date to participate in all the excitement, more details about the event can be found on the events page. Visual ...

What’s new for HTML Developers in Blend for Visual Studio 2013

At Windows’ Build conference in June, we introduced Visual Studio and Blend 2013 Preview to the world. With this release, we significantly expanded Visual Studio’s support for creating Window Store Apps using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. In addition to the client-side diagnostics and debugging tools found in Visual Studio, Blend also ...

What’s new in Visual Studio 2013 and InstallShield Limited Edition

UPDATE: We’re happy to announce the availability of the Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension. This extension provides support for Visual Studio Installer projects in Visual Studio 2013. You can download the extension from the Visual Studio Gallery. To learn more check out this blog post on Visual Studio Installer Projects extension...

Update for Extension Authors: VSIX Manifest Version Range Attribute

In Visual Studio 2010 we introduced a new deployment model for extensions, the VSIX format. This format is based on the Open Packaging Conventions and enables extension developers to create a single package that can be easily installed by Visual Studio and contain all the appropriate files to describe the extension. For Visual Studio 2012 we ...