Visual Studio Blog

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

The C# and Visual Basic Code-Focused IDE Experience

The new C# and Visual Basic code-focused IDE experience in the Visual Studio 2015 Preview is significantly improved over the experience in Visual Studio 2013 and I’m excited to share some highlights with you. We’ll look at a few key areas: Many of the new and refreshed features that I describe below come to us by way of ...

Visual Studio 2015 Preview, Visual Studio Community 2013, Visual Studio 2013 Update 4, and More

[UPDATED 8/5] Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013 Update 5, and .NET 4.6 were released on 7/20/2015. Check out this post announcing VS 2015 and VS 2013 Update 5 and this one announcing .NET framework 4.6. [UPDATE: 11/13] We have updated this post with links to detail blog posts on updated tooling for Apache Cordova and Blend for ...

Using Visual Studio to build Universal XAML Apps

At the Build conference, we announced the release of the new converged Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 platforms. As a developer, this means you can now build XAML and HTML universal apps that run on both Phone and Tablets by sharing a significant amount of code and content. To enable building universal apps, we added a number of new ...

Notifications in Visual Studio 2013

One of the benefits to having a connected IDE is that your environment can be kept up to date easily by presenting you with notifications of updates and relevant account information. Visual Studio will not only keep your environment up to date but also keep you in control of your preferred configurations. There are two main avenues for ...

MSBuild is now part of Visual Studio!

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 ...

Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop is Here

A few months ago, Soma announced plans for a Visual Studio Express 2012 edition for Windows Desktop. Today, we are happy to share that this new Express product is available for download. (You can find the system requirements and download details here.) This post is written by Jennifer Leaf, one of the program managers working on the new ...

Announcing the Microsoft “Roslyn” June 2012 CTP

In Soma’s previous blog post, we announced the first CTP of the Roslyn project.   Roslyn is a forward looking project that enables the C# and VB compilers to be used as a service.  Today, as Jason Zander discusses in more detail, we’re excited to announce the second Roslyn CTP – with full support for Visual Studio 2012 RC. You can get...

Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance Part #1

Following the //Build conference last year I posted “Addressing Visual Studio Performance” to gather your feedback on Visual Studio performance and to discuss with you those areas you felt were important for us to improve. Next, I posted “An update on Visual Studio Performance” about some of the work we are doing and promised you a set...