Visual Studio Blog

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

Productivity Power Tools 2012

By popular request, the new version of the Productivity Power Tools has arrived for Visual Studio 2012! These tools are the fruit of a few passionate engineers on the Visual Studio team that love sharing the power of Visual Studio with customers. The Productivity Power Tools are one of the top gallery extensions for Visual Studio 2010. With ...

Introducing Windows Phone SDK 8.0

It gives us great pleasure to announce that today at //build/ we launched the Windows Phone 8 development story. We have enhanced the existing Visual Studio 2012 developer tools to support development of Windows Phone 8 apps optimized for a variety of resolutions and hardware, introduced ability to simulate and monitor the impact of real life ...

Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop is Here

A few months ago, Soma announced plans for a Visual Studio Express 2012 edition for Windows Desktop. Today, we are happy to share that this new Express product is available for download. (You can find the system requirements and download details here.) This post is written by Jennifer Leaf, one of the program managers working on the new ...

Visual Studio 2012 released to the web!

On August 15th, we announced the release of Visual Studio 2012 to the web! Make sure to visit Somasegar’s Blog for the announcement, and if you haven’t downloaded yet, check out Jason Zander’s Blog for 12 reasons to upgrade. There was a lot of buzz across the blogs, so here’s a rollup of additional posts you might want to read about ...

A World of Samples at your Fingertips

Samples are the primary way that we as developers learn to develop applications for a new platform. We use samples as a starting point to learn about new APIs, we reference them when we hit bugs in our own code and need a comparison, and we share them for others to learn from our discoveries. If a picture is worth a thousand words then a ...

Announcing the Microsoft “Roslyn” June 2012 CTP

In Soma’s previous blog post, we announced the first CTP of the Roslyn project.   Roslyn is a forward looking project that enables the C# and VB compilers to be used as a service.  Today, as Jason Zander discusses in more detail, we’re excited to announce the second Roslyn CTP – with full support for Visual Studio 2012 RC. You can get...

Visual Studio 11 Performance: Improvements in Typing and Editing Responsiveness

After the beta release, we published several posts on the performance improvements in Visual Studio 11. Since the beta release, we have made a number of additional enhancements, continuing our quest to improve the performance of Visual Studio. The performance work done between beta and the upcoming RC was substantial and covered many aspects ...

Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance Part #1

Following the //Build conference last year I posted “Addressing Visual Studio Performance” to gather your feedback on Visual Studio performance and to discuss with you those areas you felt were important for us to improve. Next, I posted “An update on Visual Studio Performance” about some of the work we are doing and promised you a set...