Visual Studio Blog

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

In the Debugger’s Spotlight: A Year in Review

Reflecting on the past year's journey, our team was on a mission to enhance debugging tools, ensuring they became more efficient and user-friendly. We dedicated our efforts to boosting inner-loop productivity, making external source debugging more seamless, improving overall performance, and optimizing memory analysis. And, of course, we were ...

A Year of C++ Improvements in Visual Studio

As we enter the new year, it’s a good time to look back at all the features and improvements we made for C++ developers in Visual Studio in 2023. We’ve made advancements across the IDE, toolchain, and the vcpkg package manager in both performance and functionality. Some focus areas have been ARM64 support, Unreal Engine development, code ...

Code Faster and Better with GitHub Copilot’s New Features: Slash Commands and Context Variables

Have you ever wished you had an AI assistant that could help you write code faster and better? That’s what Visual Studio Copilot Chat offers you: an AI-powered pair programmer that can answer your questions, suggest code snippets, explain code logic, and chat with you about your project. You can use Copilot to code faster and better, as it ...

Elevate Your Git and GitHub Skills in Visual Studio with the Intermediate and Advanced Series

Git and Version Control skills are essential for development, but they’re often glossed over in coding curriculum and onboarding. We often memorize a few commands without understanding how to recover from sticky situations or leverage Git to the fullest. Are you ready to take your GitHub knowledge to the next level within Visual Studio? ...

Visual Studio productivity features in 2023

Over the last year, we’ve invested heavily in new capabilities to help Visual Studio developers code more easily. Let’s look back on some of the additions that aim to make your coding experience more productive. Productivity highlights Here’s a snapshot of some productivity enhancements that shipped in 2023, ranging from versions ...

Latest updates for C++ Remote Linux Development in Visual Studio: Remote File Explorer, Integrated Terminal, and more…

Visual Studio allows you to target your remote Linux machines so that you can still use Visual Studio’s build and debugging suite for all your remote workflows just like how you would develop locally without having to leave the IDE. To further enhance your ability to develop remotely for C++ from Visual Studio, we have added a new Remote ...

17.9 Preview 3 brings exciting changes to Code Search

With the release of 17.9 Preview 3 dropping today, we are bringing some exciting enhancements to the Code Search (also known as All-In-One Search) experience. Since our last update with the search experience, we’ve been hard at work refining the experience and ideating ways to add to the experience. Now, you can search for any word or string...

Code, Connect & Learn at Visual Studio LIVE! in Las Vegas.

As an integral part of our Visual Studio community, we're thrilled to extend a special invitation to Visual Studio LIVE!, from March 3-8, 2024, at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino. This event is a hub for developers eager to explore the latest features in the IDE plus additional insights from experts in Visual Studio, Azure, and GitHub...

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 ...

Visual Studio Performance Highlights Delivered in 2023

As we step into 2024, we're taking a moment to look back at the significant performance improvements our team delivered in 2023. Your valuable feedback, active collaboration, and unwavering support have been crucial in enhancing Visual Studio. This past year has been focused on optimizing performance, and we're thrilled to showcase the key ...