Learn tips and tricks to boost your AI-coding skills using GitHub Copilot in a virtual event.
Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Featured posts

Visual Studio 2022 v17.13 is Now Available!

We are excited to announce the availability of Visual Studio 2022 v17.13. This update focuses on stability and security, along with continuous improvements for ...
Latest posts

Build Ionic Apps in Minutes with VS Code

With our Cordova Tools Extension for Visual Studio Code, you can use your existing web skills to build cross-platform hybrid mobile applications for iOS, Android, and other platforms. This means that you can create and maintain one project to target millions of potential customers using various mobile devices. One of the most popular JavaScript hybrid frameworks that we’ve heard from our customers is Ionic. Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS and JS CSS components, gestures, and tools for building highly interactive mobile apps. It is built with SASS and optimized for Angul...

Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 RTM

Today at Build 2016 we released the final version of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. This release includes everything we shared in the Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 CTP release, as well as Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 RC. Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 has focused on improving performance and reliability and addressing your feedback. Some key scenarios where we have improved performance and responsiveness include time for Visual Studio to start when extensions are installed, time it takes to shut down Visual Studio, NuGet performance, opening Team Explorer to browse work item queries within Visual Studio, and working in ...

Visual Studio “15” Preview Now Available

At Build 2016 we shared a preview of the next version of Visual Studio, which we call Visual Studio “15” (not to be confused with Visual Studio 2015). The download is available here. This is a Preview and is unsupported, so please refrain from installing it on your production environments. This preview lays a lot of groundwork for vNext, so you may not see a ton of new features. The release notes have the complete list of what’s new in the release, but here are some highlights. Perhaps the most prominent thing you’ll notice when you go to install this release is that there are two ways to install. With Visu...

Introducing R Tools for Visual Studio

R is a programming language that is widely used by data scientists, and developers seeking a more powerful tool to work with data. While data scientists use R to write programs, their work product is rarely the program itself. Instead, they produce reports or presentations from the results generated by their R program to help influence or drive business decisions. R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS), currently available as a Public Preview release, is a new tool from Microsoft for creating R programs using Visual Studio. RTVS is free, and Open Sourced under the MIT license. It can be downloaded by following the i...

Open Sourcing the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools

We’re excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools on GitHub. Productivity Power Tools, first released in 2010, is a pack of powerful extensions to improve developer productivity including Ctrl+Click Go to Definition, Copy As HTML, and Middle Click Scroll, just to name a few. Since their introduction, these tools have been updated for every major Visual Studio release, and a number of features that started out as part of the Productivity Power Tools are now core features of Visual Studio. Making the current set of tools available to the community is important to us, an...

Open Sourcing the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools

We’re excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools on GitHub. Productivity Power Tools, first released in 2010, is a pack of powerful extensions to improve developer productivity including Ctrl+Click Go to Definition, Copy As HTML, and Middle Click Scroll, just to name a few. Since their introduction, these tools have been updated for every major Visual Studio release, and a number of features that started out as part of the Productivity Power Tools are now core features of Visual Studio. Making the current set of tools available to the community is important to us, an...

Support Ending for Visual Studio 2005

In October 2005, before Twitter, jQuery, Blu-Ray movies, Xbox 360, Amazon AWS, Internet Explorer 7, and Google Analytics, we released Visual Studio 2005. A lot has happened in software development since 2005 (we’re looking at you, C++ 11, TypeScript, .NET 4.6, Cordova, Roslyn, and UWP!). So now it’s time to say goodbye. In line with our support policy, starting April 12th 2016 Microsoft will no longer provide security updates, technical support, or hotfixes, for all Visual Studio 2005 products and the redistributable components and runtimes included with them, including the following products: ...

Announcing Tools for Apache Cordova Update 7

Fresh on the heels of Update 6, we are happy to announce the release of Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova Update 7 (version 60219.1). What’s New? In this update we have some new features as well as bug fixes. In this post I’ll share a little about some feature and bug fixes. Consume structured error data from Cordova You have told us that you need better error reporting. In update 7 we have attempted to addressed this and have taken an important first step towards improving this experience. Starting with version 6.0.0, Cordova now emits error messages through a well-defined API which our tools consume. Thi...

Microsoft joins the Eclipse Foundation and brings more tools to the community

At Microsoft, our developer mission is to deliver experiences that empower any developer, building any application, on any OS. And this mission requires us to be open, flexible, and interoperable: to meet developers and development teams where they are, and provide tools, services and platforms that help them take ideas into production. This week, we’re attending EclipseCon to connect and advance our vision with the Eclipse community. We recognize the great work coming out of the Eclipse and Java developer community and appreciate that Eclipse developer tools are used by millions of developers worldwide. We have...