Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Visual Studio 2026 is here: faster, smarter, and a hit with early adopters
Dear developers, We’re thrilled to announce that Visual Studio 2026 is now generally available! This is a moment we’ve built side by side with you. Your feed...
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Visual Studio 2017 Update
We’ve released an update to Visual Studio 2017 and you can download it and start using it today. In this update, which will show up in Help/About as 15.1 (26403.0), we’ve added support for the Windows 10 Creators Update SDK, added support in Xamarin Workbooks for C# 7, and updated the Redgate Data Tools. There is also a set of performance improvements you can read about in Bertan’s post, Visual Studio 2017 Performance Improvements.
Visual Studio 2017 Performance Improvements
Performance was a big focus area for Visual Studio 2017, with improvements in many areas, including: There are also some notable improvements in terms of memory usage in key scenarios, which should significantly reduce out of memory crashes (you can now open very large solutions; solutions that were simply impossible to open in previous versions). And Visual Studio 2017 has better identification of extensions or tool windows that may be slowing down key scenarios like startup, solution load and typing. Start your coding faster with faster startup and solution load Right after installation, you wi...
Continuous Delivery Tools Adds GitHub Support and My Build Notifications
The Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio shipped last month as a Microsoft DevLabs extension to experiment with some of the latest ideas for setting up and working with a DevOps pipeline. As with any experiment the goal is to learn and test our hypotheses. The enthusiasm and feedback has validated just how much opportunity there is to help developers continuously deliver value to their users. We’ve shipped several incremental updates that fix bugs and other minor usability improvements. Our latest update has several new improvements: Let’s walkthrough some of these improvements. Configuri...
Become a Mobile Developer with Visual Studio 2017 and Xamarin University
Millions of developers around the world use the power of C# and .NET to deliver amazing apps. Whether you’re building for desktop with Windows Forms or UWP, or for the web with ASP.NET WebForms, or MVC, .NET’s flexible tools and frameworks help you ship software that solves almost any problem. In the mobile world, Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin enable .NET developers to easily apply their existing expertise to build, test, distribute, and monitor native apps for all the major connected platforms, including Android, iOS, UWP, tvOS, and more, all from Visual Studio 2017. Our team of mobile experts at Xamarin Univ...
Apply Now for Microsoft’s Go Mobile Tech Workshops
This is your opportunity to bring Microsoft engineering experts to discuss app development and architecture best practices with your team 1:1 We’re excited to announce that the Microsoft engineering team is offering a limited number of technical sessions to help your team build better mobile apps faster. The Go Mobile Tech Workshops are 3 hour sessions dedicated to your team, covering everything from your technology stack and architecture to the latest in Visual Studio 2017, Azure, and DevOps best practices. Sign-up now What’s in it for you Sample Agenda Don’t miss out—apply for a workshop today...
Visual Studio 2017 version 15.1 Preview and Windows 10 Creators Update SDK
It’s only been a week since we released Visual Studio 2017 and we’re already working on an update: Visual Studio 2017 version 15.1 Preview. This Update preview includes two main changes: improvements to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) tools to support the Creators Update SDK and the addition of the Python tools. For full details of what’s in this preview, you can read the release notes. A Note on Updates There’s a notable change we’ve made with previews in Visual Studio 2017: you’re able to install previews side by side with the released version of Visual Studio. That means you can use Visual Studio 2017 for...
Visual Studio 2017 Poster
Since we launched Visual Studio 2017 last week, hundreds of thousands of customers like you have already installed and started using Visual Studio 2017, and we’re excited to see what you create. Visual Studio 2017 contains so many new features. From productivity enhancements to new C++ capabilities. Start using our ASP.NET Core Tooling along with Live Unit Testing. Explore C# 7 and our new database DevOps features that help improve your productivity. We thought it would be fun to put together a poster that shows off some of our favorite parts of Visual Studio 2017. You’ll also see some helpful tips and tricks ...
Live Unit Testing in Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise
Live Unit Testing is present in the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio 2017 and it’s available for C# and VB projects that target the .NET Framework. [UPDATE 5/23/2017 : We now also support .NET Core Framework. Check out this post announcing .NET Core 2.0 Preview 1 to learn about it.] This is a more comprehensive blog than the one we published in November. In this blog, we focus on all capabilities including some that were not mentioned in the earlier blog. It also includes an updated video that demos all these capabilities. FAQs are covered as well at the end. This is a productivity feature, which provides r...
Iterations on infinity
Developers like you live with the Visual Studio icons every day: clicking on them multiple times, staring at them side by side on the taskbar, and seeing them attached to project files. So when we update them, it's a big deal. After all, icons matter. For pictures that are at most just under a centimeter wide on a normal display (or under half an inch, for those of you who aren’t British like me), icons are huge. They pack a lot of meaning into a small space. They offer clues as to what kind of experience you’ll have with the application the icon represents. Some icons even establish an emotional connection: th...