Visual Studio Blog

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

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 ...

A fresh update to Visual Studio 2017 and the next preview

In his Build 2017 keynote, Scott Guthrie made several announcements across partnerships, new Azure service capabilities, and the Visual Studio family. If you didn’t get a chance to watch the keynote, check out ScottGu's blog post. From a Visual Studio product family perspective, the significant announcements are - The general availability of Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio 2017 version 15.2, Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 Preview, A preview of .NET Standard 2.0 support in .NET Core, Here’s a little more about each of these announcements.

End of Support for Visual Studio 2008 – in One Year

In line with our ten-year support policy, Visual Studio 2008, its associated products, runtimes, and components will cease to be supported from April 10, 2018. Though your Visual Studio 2008 applications will continue to work, we encourage you to port, migrate, and upgrade your Visual Studio projects over the next year, to ensure you continue ...

Join Us: Visual Studio 2017 Launch Event and 20th Anniversary

Twenty-five years ago, I started my first day at Microsoft as a developer on the Access team, and then as a developer on a newly created product – Visual InterDev. I remember how the emphasis was on the Visual part of our various product offerings, we have come a long way to the Visual Studio we have now. Today, I’m proud and humbled that Visual Studio is turning twenty – we’re celebrating two decades of Visual Studio! As we hit this great milestone, I’m also excited to announce that Visual Studio 2017 will be released on March 7.

Announcing Visual Studio “15” Preview 5

Today we released Visual Studio “15” Preview 5. With this Preview, I want to focus mostly on performance improvements, and in the coming days we’ll have some follow-up posts about the performance gains we’ve seen. I’m also going to point out some of the productivity enhancements we’ve made. So kick off the installer here and ...

New C# 7.0 features in Visual Studio “15” Preview 4

Over the past couple of previews, new C# language features have been trickling in, but Preview 4 marks a point where the majority of C# 7.0 are now available. Here's a code sample that uses a good number of these features, and that works in Preview 4 today: For a full write-up about tuples, deconstruction, pattern matching, local ...