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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 ...

A fresh update to Visual Studio 2017 and the next preview

May 10, 2017 May 10, 2017 05/10/17
John Montgomery
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

April 10, 2017 Apr 10, 2017 04/10/17
Visual Studio Blog
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 ...

Visual Studio 2017 Performance Improvements

April 5, 2017 Apr 5, 2017 04/5/17
Visual Studio Blog
Performance was a big focus area for Visual Studio 2017, with improvements in many areas, including: There are also some notable improvements in terms of memory usage in key scenarios, which should significantly reduce out of memory crashes (you can now open very large solutions; solutions that were simply impossible to open ...

Optimize your productivity with .NET in Visual Studio 2017

March 8, 2017 Mar 8, 2017 03/8/17
Visual Studio Blog
Visual Studio 2017 makes you more productive by getting you to your code fast and helping you write code quickly. With improvements to performance, navigation, and debugging as well as the additions of new refactorings, code style configuration/enforcement, and live unit testing, this release is chock full of advancements. This post shows you ...

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

February 9, 2017 Feb 9, 2017 02/9/17
Julia Liuson
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.

Extensibility in Visual Studio “15”: Increasing Reliability and Performance

November 10, 2016 Nov 10, 2016 11/10/16
Visual Studio Blog
If you’ve been following this blog, you know that in Visual Studio “15” we’ve been focused on making our developer tools easier to install, increasing performance, and enhancing developer productivity. We’ve been doing the same for extensions, and it’s time to talk a bit more about the implications of these changes both on ...

Announcing Visual Studio “15” Preview 5

October 5, 2016 Oct 5, 2016 10/5/16
John Montgomery
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

August 30, 2016 Aug 30, 2016 08/30/16
Visual Studio Blog
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 ...

Open Any Folder with Visual Studio “15” Preview

April 12, 2016 Apr 12, 2016 04/12/16
Visual Studio Blog
For developers to be truly productive in Visual Studio their code needs to be organized into Solutions and projects, right? For a long time, that was a core expectation of how Visual Studio works. Unfortunately, this requirement is a bit of a burden for those of you working across multiple tools and platforms. Sometimes Solutions make a lot ...