Visual Studio Blog

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

Announcing Update to Productivity Power Tools 2013

Today, we’re releasing an update to Productivity Power Tools 2013 on the Visual Studio Gallery. In this release, we fixed a number of customer-reported bugs and issues, and introduced a new feature called syntactic line compression. Syntactic line compression enables you to make better use of your screen’s vertical real-estate. It...

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 ...

Enhancements to Debugging and Profiling in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2

Less than a year ago, I gave you a quick overview of the many investments we made to debugging and profiling in Visual Studio 2013 RTM and got some great feedback from you about what we’d done. Now, with Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC available for download, I wanted to run you through the enhancements we have made since last summer. We’ve...

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...

Blend for HTML Behaviors and Actions

Blend for Visual Studio 2013 introduces a feature to HTML developers that may be familiar to those who already work with XAML: Behaviors. When attached to HTML elements, Behaviors add life to an application by executing a JavaScript event handler. Developers can choose from a wide variety of ready-to-use Behaviors or create their own. For ...

Auto History Extension in Visual Studio 2013

Have you ever found yourself wishing you could roll back a few hours to a piece of code you had working but have made changes to? You were “in the flow” and you haven’t checked anything in to your source control system (or perhaps weren’t using source code control on your project)? We are pleased to announce the ...

Designing pixel perfect layouts in Visual Studio 2013 and Blend

It’s a familiar scenario. You’re developing your application and you’ve got a design in mind. It may have come from a professional designer or a sketch on the back of a cocktail napkin, but you need to move from a concept to a working, implemented design. This can be easier said than done. When your design calls for the baseline of ...