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
New and Noteworthy Extensions for Visual Studio – March 2016
It was great to see the excitement around last month’s post and I heard from many of you that you have discovered some new extensions. March has been another great month for the Visual Studio ecosystem. We added over 100 extensions to the Visual Studio Gallery. To help you enjoy this creativity from the community, every month or two I’ll be introducing some of the new extensions that caught my eye. Here are the highlights for this month: Also if you missed our earlier post, we recently open sourced the Productivity Power Tools. Besides being a great tool for developers, they make great samples for real...
UI development made easier with XAML Edit & Continue
Making UI is easy. Making GREAT UI can be a bit trickier. Visual Studio wants to be the best in class tool for designing good user experiences. We have been spending a lot of our time looking at the challenges you face, learning from them, and being inspired by watching you try to solve UI problems. As a result, we have made some improvements to Visual Studio tools in both Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 and Visual Studio “15” Preview, and we are excited to see what you think of them. XAML Edit & Continue The biggest improvement for runtime debugging is Edit & Continue for XAML apps. This feature now lets y...
Visual Studio “15”: Installing Just What You Need
Over the past year, we've had the opportunity to chat with hundreds of you (developers), from those who use Visual Studio every day to those who have never used it. We observed how you setup your development environments and how they evolve and change over time. We learned that you spend a significant amount of time getting the right set of tools together and usually end up installing more than you need (both in features and in disk footprint). We heard that you think in terms of what you need for your “job” or task at hand and want your tools to be able to tell you what they need. We found that a lot of you are...
Visual Studio TACO Update 8 and new Ionic templates
Last week we announced many new Visual Studio updates, including Ionic support in the Cordova Extension for Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO) Update 8. In this post, I’ll highlight the main changes included in the Visual Studio TACO Update 8 release – which you already have If you installed Visual Studio 2015 Update 2! Along with the new VS TACO update, we’ll also discuss some new templates available to you now, using the very popular Ionic framework. In this TACO release we focused on two things: For a complete list of the changes in this release, see the VS TACO Updat...
A Vision For Visual Studio “15”: Take on Dependencies. Stay Productive.
When it comes to leveraging OSS and other reusable components, developers have more options today than ever before. Productivity gains from taking on external dependencies can evaporate quickly though, when you need to spend time debugging or searching for dependency source code. To do these tasks, you might need to enlist and rebuild a library (and replace all solution references to this rebuilt version) to take advantage of Visual Studio capabilities like “go to definition” that “just work” for your own project code. Visual Studio debugging and code exploration works pretty well (if we do say so ourselves) w...
Faster, Leaner, Focused on Your Development Needs: The New Visual Studio Installer
Visual Studio continues to grow in power and capability with each release. Our objective is to provide every developer with the tools you need to be successful whether you’re building mobile, cloud, or desktop apps regardless of your language or framework. Now that Visual Studio includes tools for Any Developer building Any App, it also includes hundreds of packages in the full installation. They come from Microsoft and others, and include runtimes and SDKs, emulators, tools and documentation. Keeping the right components installed and updated on your machine is one of the core values That Visual Studio provides ...
Mobile App Development made easy with Visual Studio and Xamarin
Last month, we announced that Microsoft acquired Xamarin and welcomed the Xamarin team to Microsoft. Today, in his Build 2016 keynote, Scott Guthrie laid out our plans for how Xamarin and Visual Studio will come together. If you haven’t already, check out Scott Guthrie’s keynote summary post and Nat Friedman’s blog. In short, we’re making Xamarin’s cross-platform tools available in Visual Studio, from Community up through Enterprise at no additional cost and we’re open-sourcing the Xamarin SDK – the core of the Xamarin toolchain. In addition, we’re making Xamarin’s services (for example, Test Cloud and Xamarin U...
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 ...