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
On the Road to Release: Redesigning Visual Studio Installation
For those of you who have been closely tracking the progress of our next release of Visual Studio (codenamed Visual Studio “15”), you’ll know that one of our big product release themes is installation and update. We are refactoring our installation to be smaller by default, faster and more reliable, and easier to manage, as described in this previous blog post: Faster, Leaner, Focused on Your Development Needs: The New Visual Studio Installer At //build, we shipped our first experimental preview of the new installation experience, with the smallest “core editor” payload for Visual Studio weighing in at abou...
Apache Cordova & the browser based workflow
Apache Cordova applications leverage HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create mobile applications that run across multiple device platforms including Android, iOS, and Windows. Today, the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO) support in Visual Studio helps you get up and running quickly using Cordova. Cordova developers are web developers, and so a lot of Cordova developers start off with using the browser as a way to quickly preview and tweak their applications. In this post, we’re announcing a new browser-based simulator for Cordova developers, which we’re introducing first in Visual Studio Code. Ionic ser...
Improved Productivity with new Version Control Features in Visual Studio 2015
Whether you’re working on a side project with some friends or developing enterprise software, odds are you’re using source control. With the advent of open source software and collaboration, source control is an increasingly important part of the developer workflow. We’ve spent the last two updates working to improve the source control experience within Visual Studio and we’re not done yet! We strive to accommodate all the various source control providers our users use and work to maintain extensible features. To this end, we’ve created a few new additions that should help developers be more productive when wo...
New Pluralsight Courses for Visual Studio Subscribers Coming in July 2016
We’re refreshing the Pluralsight course list for Visual Studio subscribers on July 1, 2016! As you may know, Pluralsight is a benefit included with your Visual Studio (MSDN) Subscription. They are a global leader in high-quality online training for developers. Pluralsight provides on-demand access to rich collection of expert-led courses, training exercises, and more. For Visual Studio subscribers, we periodically update the course selection based on subscriber demand to bring you fresh and relevant courses on a wide range of subjects from Azure to Machine Learning. This means that some of the current courses ...
Visual Studio TACO Update 10
We are proud to present Update 10 of the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO). You can look forward to installing it with Update 3 of Visual Studio 2015, or download and install it directly now. If this is the first time you’ve heard of TACO, try our beginner’s guide and build your first app for Android, iOS and Windows, with JavaScript! In Update 10, we delivered two major areas of upgrade: For more details, see our Update 10 release notes. More plugins, better plugins Part of what makes Cordova a great platform for mobile app development is its ecosystem of over 1,200 plugins that en...
Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 RC
Today we are sharing Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 RC. This release candidate primarily focuses on stability, performance, and bug fixes, but we also have some feature updates. I’ll share highlights in the rest of this post. Tools for Apache Cordova. This update includes TACO Update 9 and TACO Update 10, which adds plugins for Intune, Azure engagement, security, and SQLite storage, as well as the ability to add plugins from the config designer either by npm package name or ID. It also includes support for Cordova 6.1.1. Application Insights and HockeyApp. Developer Analytics Tools v7.0.1 adds has diagnostics tool...
dotnetConf is back! Free live streaming developer event – June 7th-9th 2016
.NET plays an important role in the lives of many Visual Studio developers, I for one have worked on many ASP.NET, WPF Desktop and other back-end .NET services over the years in my career and therefore its really exciting for me to be part of the team to bring you yet another dotnetConf, back again and streaming live this week (and for free, with no need to register)! Watch Live June 7th– 9th 2016, or catch-up on-demand via Channel 9 archive You can watch the live stream on Channel 9 for three days, June 7th-9th 2016 by simply visiting the Channel 9 website between 8:30am PDT (keynotes) and 4pm PDT each day. I...
dotnetConf is back! Free live streaming developer event – June 7th-9th 2016
.NET plays an important role in the lives of many Visual Studio developers, I for one have worked on many ASP.NET, WPF Desktop and other back-end .NET services over the years in my career and therefore its really exciting for me to be part of the team to bring you yet another dotnetConf, back again and streaming live this week (and for free, with no need to register)! Watch Live June 7th– 9th 2016, or catch-up on-demand via Channel 9 archive You can watch the live stream on Channel 9 for three days, June 7th-9th 2016 by simply visiting the Channel 9 website between 8:30am PDT (keynotes) and 4pm PDT each day. I...
Announcing the new Desktop to UWP Packaging Project for Visual Studio “15”
At the Build 2016 conference, we released the Desktop App Converter which enables you to bring your existing desktop applications to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). With the Desktop App Converter, a number of important improvements are being made to the Windows platform for all developers. First, you can convert existing Windows desktop apps or games to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) packages so your users will be able to install them easily and experience seamless updates. Once converted to the UWP application model, the desktop app has access to new UWP APIs which previously were inaccessible to deskto...