Visual Studio Blog

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

Overview of Visual Studio 2017 and Updates for .NET Developers

Visual Studio 2017 first released in March of this year. Since then, there have been five updates with each bringing more improvements and capabilities. Every improvement is geared towards making you more productive and this post aims to give you an overview of the culmination of features to date. Read on to see how you can get started working...

Large C# and VB solutions load significantly faster in 15.5 update

On average, 50 percent of all solutions opened by Visual Studio users open in ten seconds or less. However, large solutions can take longer to load because there are a lot of projects that Visual Studio needs to process. Over the last six months, we looked at ways to make solution load much faster, even for large solutions. We are happy to ...

Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.3 Released

Today we have several releases to talk about: there’s the release of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3, the release of .NET Core 2.0, and a release of Visual Studio for Mac version 7.1. If you’d like to jump right in, download Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3, download .NET Core 2.0, and download Visual Studio for Mac. You can also access the latest Visual Studio 2017 product releases through an Azure virtual machine where we offer the recommended installation of the most popular workloads and components.

All Things Mobile at Microsoft Build

We released the Xamarin SDKs as a part of Visual Studio a year ago, open sourcing them in the process. Since then, we've been busy improving the experience of mobile developers using Visual Studio, launching iOS simulator remoting, Workbooks, Inspector, the Xamarin.Forms Previewer, and support for iOS 10 and Android N. In the last year, we'...

Visual Studio 2017: Productivity, Performance, and Partners

Today we released Visual Studio 2017. Start your download and read on to learn more about some of the highlights of this release. For the complete list of changes in the release, check out the Visual Studio 2017 release notes. Some of the things I would like to highlight are: Fundamentals: Productivity and Performance 5-star Mobile ...

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 ...

Top News from October-December 2015, Part 1

It’s been a few months since our last roll-up of top developer stories, so I’ll be catching up with the news from last fall in two posts. We’ll start here in Part 1 with Visual Studio, .NET, ASP.NET, languages, and a few other tools for good measure. Part 2 will cover a variety of topics including Connect(); //2015, Windows ...

Installing the Unreal Engine in Visual Studio

As previously announced, Visual Studio has partnered with some of the most popular game engines to bring you an easy acquisition experience for game development tools.  Today we are pleased to confirm that we now provide the ability to acquire and install the Unreal Engine directly from the IDE. What is Unreal Engine? The Unreal Engine ...

The .NET Journey: Recapping the last year

Having just completed Connect(); // 2015, we thought to take a moment to review everything that’s happened with .NET over the last year, between last year's and this year's Connect();. And what a year it’s been! We’ve seen significant developments in the .NET Framework, including the release of new versions, and also the ...