It's that time of year when many people take pride in the resolutions they met, lament the ones they failed to keep, and make new ones to start afresh. Recently, I spoke with a friend and former colleague who is a software developer at a technology company in Virginia. As we shared our plans for 2018, he told me about an unmet resolution he had for...

In case you missed them, we’ve posted the Azure Cosmos Database and Azure SQL Database webinars for on-demand viewing. The first webinar takes a closer look at Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed, multi-model database service that enables scaled throughput and storage across many geographical regions. The second webinar shares how you can make...

We’re extremely excited to announce the Windows Template Studio 1.6! In this release, we added in app scheme launch, finalized our work for localization, massive improvements in accessibility, and started our work for Visual Basic support.

Here are top stories we found in our streams this week related to DevOps, VSTS, TFS and other interesting topics. TOP STORIES My Top 5 Blog Posts of 2017 – Mike Douglas 2017 was an exciting year full of DevOps and Azure projects, learning, and sharing. Planning, Scheduling and Executing – A Deeper Look [Part 1] – David Corbin Results do not spont...

Azure Functions are a serverless technology that executes code based on various triggers (i.e. a URL is called, an item is placed on a queue, a file is added to blob storage, a timer goes off.) There’s all sorts of things you can do with Azure Functions, like running high CPU-bound calculations, calling various web services and reporting results, s...

This week we released Visual Studio 2017 Update 5. In this release, we added new Git features which were based on your UserVoice requests to support Git submodules, Git worktrees, fetch --prune, and pull --rebase. To learn more about all of our Git features and what’s new in Visual Studio 2017 Update 5, check out our Git tutorials and the Visual St...

Last month we hosted Microsoft Connect(); in New York City. Connect(); is a three-day, in-person and online developer event. If you missed it, no worries! You can watch our keynotes, sessions, and on-demand videos on Channel 9. For the past five months our keynote demo team worked on a new set of reference apps. We used most of these apps and Azur...

As we recently detailed on the Office Developer blog, we are making it simpler and easier for developers to connect to Office 365 through the Microsoft Graph. For Visual Studio developers currently using the Office 365 API Tools to create applications, you should plan to transition your apps to use Microsoft Graph to access Office 365 data directly...

Vcpkg allows you to acquire and build 3rd party libraries on Windows. Once cloned, the vcpkg directory (enlistment) provides a stable set of libraries that are all compatible and based on the latest published version of these libraries. Occasionally, you may need different versions of the same library. By design, you can’t have two different versio...

The Visual C++ Build tools have been a huge success since we introduced them two years ago. The C++ Build Tools were originally released as a standalone installer that only laid down the tools required to build C++ projects without installing the Visual Studio IDE. Many developers have found them useful in environments that don’t require a full VS ...