Visual Studio Blog

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

2023 – a year of community experiments

As we enter a new year, we wanted to catch you up on several experiments your feedback and participation helped us fine tune over the course of 2023. A community experiment is when we identify features believed to increase user productivity and happiness, and then build and test it with the community of Visual Studio users. These are ...

It’s finally here. Bicep is in Visual Studio!

In less than two years, Bicep’s VS Code extension has grown from zero users to more than 15 thousand a month. In addition to the Bicep extension's success, millions of resources are now deployed with Bicep files via Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell. Our incredible community has not only shaped the suite of Bicep features we know and love today...

Adding color to bracket pairs

When dealing with deeply nested brackets in Visual Studio, it can be hard to figure out which brackets match and which do not. For people with color blindness or other optic maladies, the problem can be even worse. By color-coding bracket pairs, we’re making this much easier. (image) Various IDE’s and editors offer this feature ...

Differentiating Visual Studio instances

When you have multiple instances of Visual Studio open at the same time, it can be tricky to tell them apart. Especially if you’re working on different branches of the same solution, which makes them look almost identical. What if each instance could have a unique color so you could instantly tell them apart? Would you use it? (image...

Become a master at Git and Open Source 

Have you ever wondered how to manage your code better but never had the time to learn about Git and version control? Maybe you are the only one working on your code and thought that Git is only good for collaboration? Are you someone who has been working on proprietary code and has not had a chance to learn from or contribute to open source...

A more secure GitHub Experience

As the next step in the journey towards a more secure GitHub experience, beginning November 13th, GitHub and Visual Studio will no longer accept account passwords when authenticating with the REST API and will instead require using token-based authentication (e.g., personal access or OAuth), for all authenticated operations for GitHub.com. ...