Visual Studio Blog

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

Build and Run using Cordova CLI

With Apache Cordova, web developers can achieve maximal code re-use by building cross-platform mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. For details on how Apache Cordova works, read this blog. In order to build such a cross platform multi device application, Visual Studio uses a Cordova utility known as the Cordova command-line ...

Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio

Today we are releasing the RTM version of Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio! To get started, download Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio 2013 or Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio 2012 from the Visual Studio Extension Gallery. This extension provides smart, contextual help to solve every day dev problems like searching...

Incorporate “Big Data” Within Your Visual Studio App Using Azure HDInsight

To help make it easier to work with “big data” in your apps, we added support for Hive queries and management of data clusters with Azure HDInsight, the Microsoft Azure Hadoop cluster solution for Visual Studio. For Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, HDInsight support comes in a Visual Studio extension in the Azure SDK, and it’s baked into ...

Office 365 Client APIs for Hybrid Mobile Apps

The Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova enable developers to build mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows using web standards technologies. When used with the Office 365 API Tools for Visual Studio, developers can access Office 365 APIs from their hybrid mobile applications to access to the user’s calendar, contacts, mail, and files ...

iOS Build & Debugging with the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova

The Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova enables developers to easily build a mobile app that targets iOS, Android, and Windows with web standards technologies. At the Connect() event in mid-November, we added iOS debugging to the existing support for Windows and Android (for both Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and Visual Studio 2015 Preview). ...

Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview

Two weeks ago during the Connect() event we announced the release of the Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview. VSTU is Microsoft’s free Visual Studio add-on that enables a rich programming and debugging experience for working with the Unity gaming tools and platform. The support for Visual Studio 2015 Preview is one of VSTU 2.0 ...

Connecting to Cloud Services

Modern applications often rely on services for analytics, data storage and retrieval, and customer information. It’s increasingly common to see applications that blend together services such as Salesforce with Azure Storage and a couple of analytics services such as Application Insights or Flurry. While these services provide usable REST ...

Improving the Visual Studio Account Management Experience

Anyone who has built an application in Visual Studio that uses several services (e.g. roaming Visual Studio settings, accessing Azure services in Server Explorer, or using Windows Store) has probably experienced what we’ve come to call “sign-in Whack-A-Mole,” with prompts popping up when you least expect them to. In Visual Studio 2015 we...

Blend for Visual Studio 2015 Preview

Yesterday we released a preview of Visual Studio 2015, and as part of that we are introducing a new Blend experience. We redesigned Blend for Visual Studio 2015 to provide you with a great user interface development experience for creating beautiful XAML apps. Blend has a sleek new look consistent with Visual Studio for improved workflow ...

Tools for Apache Cordova Update: iOS Debugging & Windows 8.1 Support

At Visual Studio Connect(); we released an update to the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova. These tools allow you to use Visual Studio to build Apache Cordova-based apps written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. What makes these apps special is that they allow you to marry the familiarity of coding using web technologies with the ability to ...