Visual Studio Blog

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

A unit of profiling makes the allocations go away

In Visual Studio 17.8 Preview 2 we have updated unit test profiling, allowing you to use any of the available tools in the performance profiler – not just the instrumentation tool. With this change, it’s easy to quickly profile small units of work in isolation, make changes, and then remeasure and validate the impact of the change. ...

Elevating Debugging with Auto-decompilation and External Sources

Visual Studio has been supporting external sources debugging and decompilation for some time now. However, with the release of Visual Studio 17.7, the debugger took a significant leap forward by introducing Auto-decompilation for .NET libraries making the external code debugging in Visual Studio much more streamlined and effortless. Its ...

Learn about new and old VS tools on Visual Studio Toolbox!

Do you like watching videos to learn about new and existing Visual Studio features?  Then you should check out the Visual Studio Toolbox show!  Available on both Learn and YouTube, Visual Studio Toolbox is a show that helps you become a more productive developer in VS by highlighting tooling within the IDE and the wider Visual Studio ...

Rock Your Debugging Game: Parallel Stack Window Tips You Need to Know!

In Visual Studio 2022 17.6 and 17.7 we added a ton of new features in Parallel Stack Window that can take your multithreaded debugging to the next level. But what can the Parallel Stack Window do for you? The answer is simple - it offers valuable insights into how your code functions in multithreaded or parallel or async environments. ...

Visual Studio UI Refresh

(image) Microsoft Fluent design language provides a unified framework to create and deliver more productive, consistent, and accessible applications. The Fluent design principles have been applied across familiar products like Microsoft 365 and we’ve been using those principles in the IDE to make targeted improvements to real problems. ...

Improving Visual Studio performance with the new Instrumentation Tool

Summary With the release of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6 we are shipping our new and improved Instrumentation Tool in the Performance Profiler. Unlike the CPU Usage tool, the Instrumentation tool gives exact timing and call counts which can be super useful in spotting blocked time and average function time. To show off the tool let’s use...

Visual Studio Toolbox: Debug Threads & Tasks with Parallel Stacks

The Visual Studio Toolbox show helps you become a more productive developer by focusing on tooling in and out of Visual Studio.  Our latest episodes of VS Toolbox (available both on Learn and YouTube) feature Mark Downie and Ramkumar Ramesh from the Visual Studio Diagnostics team. They demonstrate how you can use the Threads and Tasks views ...