Visual Studio Blog

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

Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance Part #3

Welcome back to the 3rd and final part of the Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance series. This week’s topic is Debugging. As I mentioned in the 1st post debugging is a key component in your continuous interaction with Visual Studio and we heard from you that the compile, edit and debug cycle had hiccups and was sluggish. I would like to ...

Microsoft Windows Simulator Rotation and Resolution Emulation

The Windows Simulator is a tool provided in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview that helps debugging Metro style applications. Its main purpose is to enable debugging when developers want to test how their applications respond to the new Metro style capabilities without having a device that supports those capabilities. It is implemented as a ...

Roslyn Syntax Visualizers

Hello everyone! As you may have heard, today we announced the first CTP of the Roslyn project! You can visit the Roslyn MSDN Page to learn more about the project and to download the CTP. You can also read more about Roslyn at the following links - In this post I will present a brief overview of two samples that are ...

Productivity Power Tools introduces Find, Organize Imports for VB, Enhanced Scrollbar, Middle-Click Scrolling and more!

Reseting Your Extensions for the Last Time! We've heard a great deal of feedback on how each update of the Productivity Power Tools re-enables all of the extensions when it installs. If you are careful about installing the Power Tools via the extension manager or as long as an instance of Visual Studio is running, this version of the ...

New Version of the Productivity Power Tools is Available!

I am pleased to announce that we have an updated version of the Productivity Power Tools.  With this release, we've introduced 4 brand new extensions and we've fixed many of the bugs that were reported in the previous version.  If you have the Productivity Power Tools installed already, you will get a notification that a new version is ...

Tips and Tricks: Visual Studio 2010 Image Library

I was in the middle of creating UI mockups for some extensions I’ve been working on and realized that I needed some icons to polish off the sketch.  Sure, I could have just grabbed a screenshot of VS, opened up my favorite image editor, and pulled out the icon that I needed…but what if my “perfect” icon wasn’t in VS?  After...

Tips and Tricks: Quickly Closing Documents

In VS 2010, we made a design decision to move the “X” from the right side of the Tab Well  to within each tab.  Before (VS 2008) (image) After (VS 2010) (image) The majority of feedback around this change was positive, but, as with most UI changes, there has been a vocal group that preferred the older placement.  ...

Marshal.ReleaseComObject Considered Dangerous

This post describes a problem we encountered and solved during the development of Visual Studio 2010 when we rewrote some components in managed code. In this post I’ll describe the problem and what we did to solve it. This is a rather lengthy technical discussion and I apologize in advance for its dryness. It’s not essential to understand ...

How to read/write the new Visual C++ project properties

Visual C++ 2010 introduces several new project and tool properties, and deprecates some old ones.  If you’re writing a project template or Visual Studio extension that needs to programmatically read and write the new properties, you will find that these properties are not available on the standard VCConfiguration, VCCLCompilerTool, etc. set...