Visual Studio Blog

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

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 is here!

We’re excited to share that the final release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 is ready to download. If you are already using Visual Studio 2013 then you’ll soon have a notification waiting for you in the notification hub to start the download and install Update 2 for Visual Studio 2013. If you haven’t started using Visual Studio 2013 you ...

Improving Setup in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2

A few weeks ago at the Build conference, we released a release candidate of the second update to Visual Studio 2013. This update of Visual Studio contained significant new functionality including being able to create Universal Apps for both Windows and Windows Phone. To be able to target Windows Phone, developers need to use emulators which ...

Authoring Windows 8.1 Apps in XAML

At the BUILD conference last week, we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 and Blend for Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. We have been busy improving the overall experience of XAML development in Visual Studio and Blend, and this post gives you an overview of some of the cool new features we have added to this Update that you ...

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 ...

Building Windows Phone 8.1 Apps in HTML

Last week at the BUILD conference, we announced that you can now build apps for Windows Phone 8.1 using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using much the same techniques you use for building Windows 8.1 Store apps today. To help you build these apps, we’ve made many improvements to Visual Studio 2013 and Blend for Visual Studio 2013. In this post, we...

The Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2013 Update 2

Release candidate of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 is now available to download. This update supports TFS 2013 Update 2 RTM as well as the Windows 8.1 Update 1 and Windows Phone 8.1 platform releases announced yesterday. Checkout Somasegar’s blog where he talks about these new releases, the .NET Native preview release, TypeScript 1.0 and more...

Windows Embedded Compact 2013 now available for Visual Studio 2013

As announced recently on the Windows Embedded blog, the Windows Embedded Compact 2013 product is now generally available. This update release includes integration to the latest Visual Studio 2013 through updated platform builder and application builder, inbox WiFi device driver for TI SDP44xx and debugging features. Visual Studio 2013 ...

Improving High-DPI support for Visual Studio 2013

Visual Studio has had support for High-DPI modes for some time. Visual Studio 2010 adopted WPF as its primary UI framework, which addressed many existing high-DPI issues. Some of our components which leverage Win32, however, had not been fully updated to incorporate high-DPI awareness. At the beginning of 2013, Microsoft shipped the Surface Pro which supported 210 pixels per inch and with a default DPI scaling of 150%. Later that year, 4k resolution displays debuted at CES in Las Vegas. We committed to making sure we were ready for these devices.