Visual Studio Blog

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

Visual Studio productivity features in 2023

Over the last year, we’ve invested heavily in new capabilities to help Visual Studio developers code more easily. Let’s look back on some of the additions that aim to make your coding experience more productive. Productivity highlights Here’s a snapshot of some productivity enhancements that shipped in 2023, ranging from versions ...

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

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 ...

Visual Studio 2022 17.7 Preview 2 is here!

Welcome to the Public Preview 2 of Visual Studio version 17.7! Hot on the heels of our recent Preview 1, we're thrilled to roll out another collection of upgrades tailored to empower developers like you. Preview 2 pushes the boundaries further, providing speed, productivity, and collaboration improvements for developers across different ...

Dev Drive for Performance Improvements in Visual Studio and Dev Boxes!

Performance has always been one of our key investment areas for developer tooling in Microsoft. We understand that it’s important for developers to have a fast workflow. That’s why we’re excited to share with you the support of Dev Drives in Visual Studio! Dev Drive for Visual Studio has just been released to help you optimize your ...

Visual Studio 2022 – 17.5 Released

We’re excited to announce that Visual Studio 17.5 is now generally available. This release is full of updates that take friction out of your daily workflows making it easier for you stay in the zone while you code. Features like all-in-one search and intent-based suggestions help you move faster, while improved build and debug speeds ensure ...

VS2022 Performance Enhancements: Git Branch Switching

Have you experienced delays when switching between your Git branches in Visual Studio? Did you have to wait for your solution and projects to reload after switching between branches in a Git repository? We are happy to announce performance enhancements to the branch switching experience in Visual Studio 2022. To benefit from the latest ...

New Profiler feature in Visual Studio

Introducing the new File I/O tool  We just launched a new profiling tool in Visual Studio 17.2 that helps you understand how you can optimize your File I/O operations to improve performance in your apps. If you’re trying to investigate and diagnose slow loading times, the new File IO tool can help you understand how the I/O operations ...

Live Unit Testing Preview: Better and Faster

Live Unit Testing is the automatic test running feature in Visual Studio Enterprise. As you make code changes, Live Unit Testing detects what tests are impacted and runs them in the background. This way you always know if the tests covering a certain line of code are passing or failing. You can see what your code coverage is for each line of ...

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4 is now available!

We are excited to announce the fourth preview release of Visual Studio 2022! With Preview 4, there are more new capabilities on the themes of personal and team productivity, modern development, and constant innovation. In this blog, we're highlighting a few of the new capabilities of Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4. We’d love for you to ...