Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Agent mode is now generally available with MCP support
Copilot agent mode is the next evolution in AI-assisted development—and it's now generally available in the Visual Studio June update. Agent mode turns GitHu...
Latest posts
Connect(); // 2016 starts Nov 16th
As hundreds of people across Microsoft head towards New York City we wanted to take this opportunity to write a short blog post to remind our community that we’re almost ready to unveil Connect(); // 2016, Microsoft’s big fall developer event, streaming live and totally for free from November 16th through the 18th. You might be reading this and asking the question “so why should you watch this?” or “what exactly is the agenda like this year?”, so let us walk you through all the details so you can decide. Day 1: November 16th (6:45am – 1:30pm PST) Keynotes: November 16th we will be live streaming from 9:4...
Extensibility in Visual Studio “15”: Increasing Reliability and Performance
If you’ve been following this blog, you know that in Visual Studio “15” we’ve been focused on making our developer tools easier to install, increasing performance, and enhancing developer productivity. We’ve been doing the same for extensions, and it’s time to talk a bit more about the implications of these changes both on extension authors and on customers who are using extensions. A quick summary of the changes we’re making: The rest of the post goes into more detail on each of these areas. If you’re an extension author, you’ll want to read this post carefully, since we’re asking you to do so...
Answers to your top TACO questions
Last month I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion at the Microsoft Ignite conference where we discussed mobile app development. I spoke about Visual Studio’s Tools for Apache Cordova (a.k.a. “TACO” for short) side-by-side with James Montemagno of Xamarin fame, Ankit Asthana from the Visual Studio C++ team, and Daniel Jacobson from the UWP team. I heard a lot of really good questions from the audience. Some of these questions are so common that I figure many of our Visual Studio blog readers may find them interesting. In this post I’m going to share the answers to our most common TACO questions....
What’s new in Visual Studio “15” Preview 5 for Universal Windows Developers
In Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, we introduced support for building apps that target the Windows Anniversary Update SDK. Visual Studio “15” continues where VS 2015 left off and brings several new experiences and enhancements for UWP developers. We have been focusing on improving three major areas: While you’ll continue to see a steady stream of improvements in upcoming releases of VS “15”, there are several new experiences in this release for you to try and give feedback. UWP tools with the new Visual Studio "15" installer Getting started with tools for UWP development has never been easier or f...
Announcing Visual Studio “15” Preview 5
Today we released Visual Studio “15” Preview 5. With this Preview, I want to focus mostly on performance improvements, and in the coming days we’ll have some follow-up posts about the performance gains we’ve seen. I’m also going to point out some of the productivity enhancements we’ve made. So kick off the installer here and read the rest of the post. You can also grab the release notes here. A big step forward in performance and memory efficiency I’d like to start with a side-by-side video that will give you a sense of all the performance improvements in one look. This video compares starting Visual Studio ...
Join us this November for Connect(); 2016
Today, I am excited to announce that our popular developer event Connect(); is back for a third year on November 16th and 17th and will be live-streamed globally from New York City. I encourage you to save the date for what promises to be our best Connect(); yet. At Connect(); 2016, Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie and Principal Program Manager Scott Hanselman, alongside leading industry innovators, will share the latest innovations from Visual Studio, .NET, Xamarin, Azure, SQL, Windows, Office and more. Over the two days, you’ll have the opportunity to engage in live, interactive Q&A sessions with ou...
New C# 7.0 features in Visual Studio “15” Preview 4
Over the past couple of previews, new C# language features have been trickling in, but Preview 4 marks a point where the majority of C# 7.0 are now available. Here's a code sample that uses a good number of these features, and that works in Preview 4 today: For a full write-up about tuples, deconstruction, pattern matching, local functions, and the rest of C# 7.0, head over to the .NET Blog. Earlier versions of some of these features were shown at Build 2016. Happy hacking!
Visual Studio “15” Preview 4
Today we released Visual Studio “15” Preview 4, introducing many new improvements and bug fixes that bring us one stage closer to the product’s completion. The highlight of this release is that nearly all of VS is running on the new setup engine, resulting in a smaller, faster and less impactful installation. The smallest install is less than 500 MB on disk (compared to 6GB in the previous release of Visual Studio). There are a couple of “workloads” that aren’t present yet, including .NET Core tooling and Azure tooling, but the rest of the existing VS 2015 feature set is available. For more background t...
Fewer Visual Studio Sign-in Prompts
You've told us that Visual Studio makes you sign in WAY too often. Over the last year, we've released several improvements to help address your feedback. The keychain we released with Visual Studio 2015 made it possible to manage multiple identities in VS and gave you single sign-on across the IDE. In the last few updates, we’ve made changes to core services like licensing and roaming, which allow you to refresh your license or roam your settings for up to a year or more without a prompt for credentials. We also updated the Windows store publishing features to use the keychain for single sign-on with the rest of ...