Visual Studio Blog

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

Simplify extension development with PackageReference and the VSSDK meta package

October 10, 2018 Oct 10, 2018 10/10/18

Mads Kristensen

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 made it possible to use the PackageReference syntax to reference NuGet packages in Visual Studio Extensibility (VSIX) projects. This makes it much simpler to reason about NuGet packages and opens the door for having a complete meta package containing the entire VSSDK. Before using PackageReference, here’s ...

Introducing ‘Suggest a Feature’ in Developer Community

October 9, 2018 Oct 9, 2018 10/9/18

John Montgomery

Customer feedback is a critical input to help us improve Visual Studio. Up until two years ago, the Visual Studio customer feedback system left room for improvement – customers could use the “send a smile” feature in Visual Studio, but this would result in only coarse-grained feedback such as “I like this” or “I don’t like this...

Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac Support Updates

October 5, 2018 Oct 5, 2018 10/5/18

Paul Chapman

As we work to bring you Visual Studio 2019, our team will release the final update to Visual Studio 2017, version 15.9, in the coming months; you can try a preview of version 15.9 here. We’d love your feedback on this release as we finish it up; use Report-a-Problem to submit issues. Following our standard Visual Studio support policy, ...

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 Preview 3

October 4, 2018 Oct 4, 2018 10/4/18

Angel Zhou

Today, we are releasing the third preview of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9. You can download it here and share your feedback with our engineering teams. This release includes ARM64 support in UWP apps as well as improvements to Xamarin and TypeScript. Continue reading below for an overview the fixes and new features. If you’d like to see ...

How to upgrade extensions to support Visual Studio 2019

September 26, 2018 Sep 26, 2018 09/26/18

Mads Kristensen

Recently, I’ve updated over 30 of my extensions to support Visual Studio 2019 (16.0). To make sure they work, I got my hands on a very early internal build of VS 2019 to test with (working on the Visual Studio team has its benefits). This upgrade process is one of the easiest I’ve ever experienced. I wanted to share my steps with you to...

Getting started writing Visual Studio extensions

September 26, 2018 Sep 26, 2018 09/26/18

Mads Kristensen

I’m often asked how to best learn to build Visual Studio extensions, so here is what I wished someone told me before I got started. Don’t skip the introduction It’s easy to create a new extensibility project in Visual Studio, but unless you understand the basics of how the extensibility system works, then you are setting yourself up ...

How can I pause my code in Visual Studio? Breakpoints FAQ

September 13, 2018 Sep 13, 2018 09/13/18

Leslie Richardson

Have you ever found a bug in your code and wanted to pause code execution to inspect the problem? This blog post showcases the various kinds of breakpoints that can be used to accomplish this task in Visual Studio 2017.

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 Preview 2

September 11, 2018 Sep 11, 2018 09/11/18

Angel Zhou

Today, we are releasing the second preview of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9, and it can be downloaded here. This latest preview contains new features and improvements to Universal Windows Platform development, C++ debugging, and export installation settings. Read more in the feature highlight summary below and check out the Visual Studio ...

Improving your productivity in the Visual Studio Editor

August 30, 2018 Aug 30, 2018 08/30/18

Allison Buchholtz-Au

Over the last few updates to Visual Studio 2017, we’ve been hard at work adding new features to boost your productivity while you’re writing code. Many of these are the result of your direct feedback coming from the UserVoice requests, Developer Community tickets, and direct feedback we’ve encountered while talking to developers like you...

Visual Studio for Mac version 7.6

August 20, 2018 Aug 20, 2018 08/20/18

Dominic Nahous

For this release of Visual Studio for Mac, we’ve focused our energy on improving product reliability, creating a better code editing experience, and making the performance second to none. We’re also exited to announce full support for Azure functions – it’s now possible to create, edit, configure, and publish your Function from within the IDE.