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Spend more time working on the interesting stuff

November 16, 2017 Nov 16, 2017 11/16/17
Visual Studio Blog
There’s a reason that each day thousands of developers take advantage of the rich set of extensions offered by our growing family of VS and VSTS Partners and the broader VS community. Collectively these offerings can save you and your team time in many different ways, from helping find bugs faster, to making it easier to work with data, to ...

Run book Run! From physical paper to executable online books

October 26, 2017 Oct 26, 2017 10/26/17
Visual Studio Blog
(image) Have you ever wanted to run the code samples while reading a book? Without having to first download the sample code, its runtime, and configure your environment so that everything is setup the way you need it? What if you could be reading a book, and immediately execute (and change!) the code without needing to install anything on your...

Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.5 Preview

October 24, 2017 Oct 24, 2017 10/24/17
Christine Ruana
Yesterday we released the second Preview of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5 and we would love it if you would try it out and tell us what you think. We’ve polished up some features that were introduced with the first Preview, addressed some of the issues you’ve reported, and made improvements in the product's fundamentals such as performance, reliability, and productivity.

7 Hidden Gems in Visual Studio 2017

October 5, 2017 Oct 5, 2017 10/5/17
Anson Horton
I’ve been working on developer tooling for over 16 years, and I still love it when I find a new tip or trick that shaves seconds off a repetitive task. The set below are features that I see infrequently used but can save loads of time! Gem #1 - Expression Evaluator Format Specifiers The part of the debugger that processes the language ...

Source Control Showcase: Integrating Subversion and Perforce into Visual Studio 2017

September 21, 2017 Sep 21, 2017 09/21/17
Visual Studio Blog
Last year, we highlighted the new extensibility points for our source control providers. These hooks allowed them to take advantage of our start page and status bar to provide their users a more integrated experience in Visual Studio. Two of our partners, VisualSVN and Perforce, have taken advantage of this opportunity and we’re excited to ...

A significant update to the XAML Designer

September 11, 2017 Sep 11, 2017 09/11/17
Visual Studio Blog
The XAML designers in Visual Studio and Blend have been powerful tools for developers and designers alike to build beautiful user experiences for Windows applications. Initially designed for WPF development in 2007, we have made significant changes to support a wide variety of XAML platforms over the last decade. We’ve also added new ...

Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.3 Released

August 14, 2017 Aug 14, 2017 08/14/17
John Montgomery
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.

Visual Studio for Mac version 7.2 Alpha Preview

August 2, 2017 Aug 2, 2017 08/2/17
Visual Studio Blog
Today we’ve released a new alpha preview for Visual Studio for Mac in the alpha updater channel - our first preview for version 7.2. The major themes for this release are improving the performance and accessibility support. Trying the Latest Version If you’re already on the bleeding edge with the Alpha channel, simply check for updates ...

CodePush joins Visual Studio Mobile Center

July 31, 2017 Jul 31, 2017 07/31/17
Visual Studio Blog
[Update 11/15/2017: Visual Studio Mobile Center is now Visual Studio App Center. Learn more on the announcement post from Connect(); 2017] About two years ago, a group of developers at Microsoft crafted a service for distributing Apache Cordova, React Native, and Windows Mobile updates to applications in the wild. They called it “CodePush...