Visual Studio Blog

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

A Year of C++ Game Development Improvements in Visual Studio

Game development is evolving rapidly and keeping up with the latest trends is crucial. I’m thrilled that David Li took the time to highlight all the improvements added to Visual Studio for game developers during 2023. Check out his blog here.  The Unreal Engine integrations are where my eyes jumped to first. There is now an Unreal Engine...

A Look Back: Visual Studio’s Profiling Tool Advancements in 2023

In retrospect, the past year our team was on a mission to enhance Profiling tools, making them more efficient and user-friendly. We improved instrumentation and our .NET counter tool, broadened platform support, seamlessly integrated unit test profiling, and boosted overall performance. Your valuable feedback via Developer Community was ...

In the Debugger’s Spotlight: A Year in Review

Reflecting on the past year's journey, our team was on a mission to enhance debugging tools, ensuring they became more efficient and user-friendly. We dedicated our efforts to boosting inner-loop productivity, making external source debugging more seamless, improving overall performance, and optimizing memory analysis. And, of course, we were ...

A unit of profiling makes the allocations go away

In Visual Studio 17.8 Preview 2 we have updated unit test profiling, allowing you to use any of the available tools in the performance profiler – not just the instrumentation tool. With this change, it’s easy to quickly profile small units of work in isolation, make changes, and then remeasure and validate the impact of the change. ...

Elevating Debugging with Auto-decompilation and External Sources

Visual Studio has been supporting external sources debugging and decompilation for some time now. However, with the release of Visual Studio 17.7, the debugger took a significant leap forward by introducing Auto-decompilation for .NET libraries making the external code debugging in Visual Studio much more streamlined and effortless. Its ...

Rock Your Debugging Game: Parallel Stack Window Tips You Need to Know!

In Visual Studio 2022 17.6 and 17.7 we added a ton of new features in Parallel Stack Window that can take your multithreaded debugging to the next level. But what can the Parallel Stack Window do for you? The answer is simple - it offers valuable insights into how your code functions in multithreaded or parallel or async environments. ...

Improving Visual Studio performance with the new Instrumentation Tool

Summary With the release of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6 we are shipping our new and improved Instrumentation Tool in the Performance Profiler. Unlike the CPU Usage tool, the Instrumentation tool gives exact timing and call counts which can be super useful in spotting blocked time and average function time. To show off the tool let’s use...

Streamlining your Debugging process with Breakpoint Groups

Have you ever had a situation when you are debugging a complex scenario with a huge list of breakpoints, and you find yourself scrolling and tapping in the breakpoints windows to disable/enable them individually and repetitively? Then the new Breakpoint Groups feature in Visual Studio may be the answer for you. This feature will allow you ...

The fastest way to add files and folders

Your Visual Studio team is excited to announce the release of the highly anticipated "Quick Add Files & Folders" feature in Visual Studio version 17.5! This new feature is the fastest and most convenient way to add files and create folders within your projects. Based on the feedback from the Visual Studio Developer Community, Quick Add ...

Maximizing the value of IntelliCode with API usage examples: Real-World Code Examples at Your Fingertips

As a software developer, we've all faced the frustration of having to leave our IDE to search for documentation, code examples, Stack Overflow, blog posts or simply trying to remember how to use a certain API. What if we told you that we have a solution for you? Now with Visual Studio 17.6 Preview, IntelliCode makes finding real-world code ...