Visual Studio Blog

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

A new MSBuild editing experience

March 27, 2024 Mar 27, 2024 03/27/24

Mikayla Hutchinson

MSBuild is a fundamental part of the .NET development experience, but it can be challenging to new and experienced developers alike. To help developers better understand their project files and access advanced functionality that requires editing the project file directly, we’re releasing an experimental MSBuild editor that has a much richer...

Visual Studio Toolbox: Accelerate your builds of SDK-style .NET projects

June 22, 2023 Jun 22, 2023 06/22/23

Leslie Richardson

The Visual Studio Toolbox show helps you become a more productive developer by focusing on tooling in and out of Visual Studio. Our latest episode of VS Toolbox (available both on Learn and YouTube) features Drew Noakes from the .NET team. He demonstrates how you can dramatically reduce build times for SDK-style .NET projects. What is ...

Get Ready for Visual Studio at Build 2023:
Join Tens of Thousands Online!

May 15, 2023 May 15, 2023 05/15/23

Jim Harrer

Are you geared up for Build 2023? Microsoft's flagship developer conference is just a week away, and we have an incredible lineup of Visual Studio sessions that you simply cannot afford to miss! (image) This year, Microsoft Build goes hybrid, offering you the best of both worlds - virtual and in-person experiences in Seattle, ...

The Visual Studio family welcomes you at Microsoft Build 2021

May 18, 2021 May 18, 2021 05/18/21

Sachin Thakur

Come join us at Microsoft Build, our largest developer conference, to explore what’s new in tech. This year, Build will be kicking off at 8:30 AM Pacific Time on Tuesday, May 25, 2021 (see in your time zone). You can expect an event packed with exciting product announcements, live keynotes, breakout sessions with cool demos, and Q&A with...

Top News for September 2015

October 27, 2015 Oct 27, 2015 10/27/15

Visual Studio Blog

Hello everyone! Every month we share some top stories from the previous month, and here’s our round-up for September. Open-source, cross-platform MSBuild: Continuing the open-source, cross-platform .NET story that is already well underway with .NET Core and the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”), MSBuild is joining the fun as...

MSBuild is now part of Visual Studio!

July 24, 2013 Jul 24, 2013 07/24/13

Visual Studio Blog

We made a number of exciting changes to MSBuild for Visual Studio 2013, including rethinking the fundamental relationship between MSBuild, Visual Studio, and the .NET Framework. MSBuild has shipped as a component of the .NET framework since it was first introduced in 2005 with .NET 2.0, despite the fact that it is, first and foremost, a ...

Debugging MSBuild script with Visual Studio (3)

July 8, 2010 Jul 8, 2010 07/8/10

Visual Studio Blog

In my last two posts (here and here) I showed how to enable the unsupported MSBuild debugger to debug a build started on the command line with MSBuild.exe. In this final post, I'll mention some other variations. Note that this blog is rather narrow, so some of the screenshots may be hard to see – you can click on them to see the full size ...

Debugging MSBuild script with Visual Studio (2)

July 8, 2010 Jul 8, 2010 07/8/10

Visual Studio Blog

In my previous post, I showed how to enable the hidden Visual Studio debugger for MSBuild script, and demonstrated it by stepping through the evaluation of a C# project. In this post, I'll keep debugging into the actual build of that project. Note that this blog is rather narrow, so some of the screenshots may be hard to see – you can click...

Debugging MSBuild script with Visual Studio

July 6, 2010 Jul 6, 2010 07/6/10

Visual Studio Blog

Back when we started 4.0 development, I polled readers of the MSBuild blog to find out what features were most important to them. Debugging was #1 which was very surprising to us. Thinking about it more, it makes sense. In our team we've become so proficient ourselves at reading the XML and making sense of logs that it's easy to forget how ...

Better Parallelism in MSBuild 4 with YieldDuringToolExecution

June 1, 2010 Jun 1, 2010 06/1/10

Visual Studio Blog

Introduction In MSBuild 4 we introduced several performance improvements, particular for large interdependent builds. By and large they are automatic and you receive their benefit without making any changes to the way your build process in authored. However, there are still some cases where we are unable to make the best decision...

Visual Studio Blog

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