Visual Studio Blog

The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team

News and Announcements at Connect(); //2015

Today we held the Connect(); //2015 event in New York, where we introduced many new products and features that we’ve been working on. In this post I’ll share the highlights with you, and you can watch the Connect(); event along with many additional on-demand videos on http://www.visualstudio.com/connect2015. Visual Studio Code ...

Writing and Using Custom Code in U-SQL – User-Defined Functions

In my last blog post, I introduced U-SQL as the new Big Data query language for the Azure Data Lake that unifies the benefits of SQL with the expressive power of your own code. Today we are announcing the availability of the Azure Data Lake in public preview. You can now try U-SQL in Visual Studio and run it over massive amounts of data in the...

Top News for September 2015

Hello everyone! Every month we share some top stories from the previous month, and here’s our round-up for September. Open-source, cross-platform MSBuild: Continuing the open-source, cross-platform .NET story that is already well underway with .NET Core and the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”), MSBuild is joining the fun as...

Introducing U-SQL – A Language that makes Big Data Processing Easy

Microsoft announced the new Azure Data Lake services for analytics in the cloud that includes a hyper-scale repository, a new analytics service built on YARN that allows data developers and data scientists to analyze all data, and HDInsight, a fully managed Hadoop, Spark, Storm and HBase service. Azure Data Lake Analytics includes U-SQL, a ...

Top News for August 2015

Hello everyone! Every month we share some top stories from the previous month, and here’s our round-up for August. DevOps tops the list this month! Brian Harry leads the way with his announcement on Visual Studio Online’s September pricing and licensing changes (short read: a new less expensive, tiered pricing model went into ...

Top Azure News for Visual Studio Developers – August 2015

A lot has happened on the Azure side of the house in the last couple of months. We wanted to give you some of the highlights in case you aren’t already following the Azure blog, focusing especially on items that are most relevant to developers using Visual Studio. Using App Service Web Apps Continuous Deployment with GitHub ...

Azure Virtual Machine Images for Visual Studio

Over the last year we have been constantly expanding our Visual Studio image offerings for the Microsoft Azure virtual machine gallery. The images have proven to be very popular not only for evaluating new Visual Studio releases but also for using them as developer environments in the cloud. In this post we’ll walk you through all the images...

Incorporate “Big Data” Within Your Visual Studio App Using Azure HDInsight

To help make it easier to work with “big data” in your apps, we added support for Hive queries and management of data clusters with Azure HDInsight, the Microsoft Azure Hadoop cluster solution for Visual Studio. For Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, HDInsight support comes in a Visual Studio extension in the Azure SDK, and it’s baked into ...