Visual Studio Blog

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

Become a Visual Studio for Mac super user with this Tips and Tricks Video Series

Visual Studio for Mac comes packed with powerful, yet hidden features. In this video series, we put together a number of tips and tricks to help you become more productive and efficient with writing code with Visual Studio for Mac. Whether you're creating a new game with Unity or a new web application with .NET Core, these short, roughly 5-minute, videos will help you do it better and faster. Check out the new series now!

How to Convince Your Management to Upgrade to Visual Studio 2017 for C# and C++ Developers

Visual Studio 2017 is our best IDE yet. To help you write great code, it’s packed with new Refactorings and Quick Actions, and offers unit testing, debugging, navigation, and code style improvements. It loads solutions faster than ever, and ships with C# 7.3 and the MSVC compiler toolset that conforms to the latest C++ standards.

Snapshots on Exceptions while debugging with IntelliTrace

Have you ever encountered an exception in your application while debugging, and wanted to know exactly what the state of the app was at that point in time? With a new feature in IntelliTrace, you can! Learn how to use IntelliTrace's new snapshots on exceptions feature, which enables you to go back to a previous exception event and see the state of the application at the time the exception was thrown.

7 Hidden Gems in Visual Studio 2017

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 ...

7 More Lesser-known Debugging Tactics for Visual Studio

So, you really liked learning about 7 Lesser Known Debugging Hacks for Visual Studio? Good news is that there is always more to learn! The Visual Studio debugger is an enchanting creature that can save you loads of time while finding and fixing issues in your application. It is bursting with tools that can make debugging easier… if you know ...

7 lesser known hacks for debugging in Visual Studio

The Visual Studio debugger is a magical beast that can save you loads of time while finding and fixing issues in your application. It is chock-full of tools that can make debugging easier… if you know they exist, and where to find them! Let’s look at 7 lesser known goodies you can use to help you #SuperChargeYourDebugging. 1. Click to Set ...

Visual Studio Hidden Gems

Visual Studio is a powerful IDE with hundreds of productivity features to empower developers to do more, faster. I joined the Visual Studio team about a year ago, and here are some of the great things I’ve discovered. These are all in Visual Studio 2015, and some have been there for a few versions now so you’ll find them in previous ...

Tools for Apache Cordova – Samples and Docs

Open source code is the norm for so many developers these days, and unsurprisingly, so is open documentation. From Azure to TypeScript, public repositories have become a go-to place for sharing samples, tutorials, and “tips and tricks” so that everyone can learn and contribute together as a community. So beginning today, we’...

Debugging Tips and Tricks

Unfortunately bugs are a part of software development, and despite our best efforts to write software correctly from the start we spend a lot of time in the debugger. While bugs are an unfortunate fact of life, finding them doesn’t have to be as painful as it often is. For you problem-solvers out there, the Visual Studio 2015 debugger ...