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...
Latest posts
Visual Studio Hidden Gems
Visual Studio is a powerful IDE with hundreds of productivity features to empower developers to do more, faster. I joined the Visual Studio team about a year ago, and here are some of the great things I’ve discovered. These are all in Visual Studio 2015, and some have been there for a few versions now so you’ll find them in previous versions of Visual Studio as well. Quick Launch (Ctrl+Q) Quick-Launch is an enhanced search box that sits in the title bar in the top-right corner. Not only will it let you find menu commands and options switches, it will also let you search files, set...
Node.js Tools 1.2 for Visual Studio 2015 released
What time is it?! Time to announce that our next stable release of Node.js Tools 1.2 for Visual Studio (NTVS) is available for download! NTVS 1.2 supports Visual Studio 2015 (including the free Visual Studio Community Edition and Express for Web). With Node.js Tools for Visual Studio, we strive to make it easier than ever to build enterprise-grade Node.js applications by supporting you at every stage of your application—from powerful code completions, to advanced debugging and profiling, to unit testing, cloud deployment, and much, much more. What’s new in v1.2? Apart from support for Node.js v6.x and numerous b...
Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.3
Today we’re releasing Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.3. The Visual Studio extension natively supported by Unity on Windows makes it easier for game developers to use the rich capabilities of the Visual Studio IDE to develop cross-platform games with Unity. Main changes The highlights of VSTU 2.3 include: How to Update The easiest way to update VSTU is to use the Visual Studio IDE extension manager. If you want to update manually, you need to download and install the VSTU version that matches the Visual Studio version you have installed and want to use with Unity. If you are running Unity 5.2 or abov...
Developer Assistant now supports C++
Today we are happy to announce a major update to Developer Assistant! Developer Assistant now offers contextually aware web powered solutions for C++. Developer Assistant for Visual Studio is a productivity plugin that brings the combined power of Bing search capabilities and your development environment to solve your day-to-day developer problems. With the addition of C++, we are opening up new possibilities for millions of C++ developers on Visual Studio. We are now expanding all the 3 important components of Developer Assistant to C++ With the addition of 43 Million C++ code samples, our total corpus...
Visual Studio “15” Preview 3
Today I am happy to share Visual Studio “15” Preview 3 (which is different from Visual Studio 2015 Update 3). This is still a Preview and is unsupported, so my recommendation is to not install it on your production environments. That said, it should install right on top of any previous Visual Studio “15” Previews and side by side with previous versions of Visual Studio. Here are the Visual Studio “15” Preview Release Notes, and Visual Studio “15” Preview 3 Known Issues. We’re still laying some of the foundational groundwork, but we do have some new features, including some improvements in IntelliSense to help yo...
Webinar: Learn how to build cross-platform apps with Visual Studio and Xamarin
One of our goals at Microsoft is to give developers the tools they need to build native, cross-platform apps for Android, iOS and Windows. Our recent acquisition of Xamarin gives you 100% native API access so you can create truly native user experiences. If you attended Build 2016 in April, you most likely had the chance to see some of the capabilities in the latest release of Xamarin. Whether it’s your first time delving into cross-platform mobile development, or you’re looking for ways to be more effective, watch this webinar with Xamarin’s James Montemagno. James has nearly a decade of experience as a program...
Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 and .NET Core 1.0 Available Now
[UPDATED July 15th – New patch is now available to fix some top bugs in Update 3. Check Update July 15th tag] [UPDATED June 30th – See update tag within the post for details] Today we are sharing the final release of Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 3, and .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0. I’m going to start with .NET Core and ASP.NET Core. If you’ve not been following the .NET blog or the WebDev blog, .NET Core is a cross-platform, open source, and modular .NET platform for creating modern web apps, microservices, libraries and console applications that run on Windows, Mac, and Lin...
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...