Visual Studio Blog

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

Live Unit Testing Preview: Better and Faster

Live Unit Testing is the automatic test running feature in Visual Studio Enterprise. As you make code changes, Live Unit Testing detects what tests are impacted and runs them in the background. This way you always know if the tests covering a certain line of code are passing or failing. You can see what your code coverage is for each line of ...

How to Convince Your Management to Upgrade to Visual Studio 2017 for C# and C++ Developers

Visual Studio 2017 is our best IDE yet. To help you write great code, it’s packed with new Refactorings and Quick Actions, and offers unit testing, debugging, navigation, and code style improvements. It loads solutions faster than ever, and ships with C# 7.3 and the MSVC compiler toolset that conforms to the latest C++ standards.

The .NET Journey: Recapping the last year

Having just completed Connect(); // 2015, we thought to take a moment to review everything that’s happened with .NET over the last year, between last year's and this year's Connect();. And what a year it’s been! We’ve seen significant developments in the .NET Framework, including the release of new versions, and also the ...

Visual Studio Update 1 RTM

Today we’re releasing Visual Studio 2015 Update 1. Let me be the first to thank everyone who installed these earlier releases, provided feedback, and helped us iron out the kinks. [The final release of Team Foundation Server Update 1 is also available today, which you can read about on Brian Harry's blog.] I’ve already shared...

Top News for September 2015

Hello everyone! Every month we share some top stories from the previous month, and here’s our round-up for September. Open-source, cross-platform MSBuild: Continuing the open-source, cross-platform .NET story that is already well underway with .NET Core and the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”), MSBuild is joining the fun as...

IntelliTest for .NET – Test More with Less (effort)

Writing a suit of unit tests that exhaustively exercise and validate the logic of the code under test is not easy. It can even be considered too expensive to do at all. Fortunately, the IntelliTest feature shipping in the Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise Edition addresses both concerns: it helps you achieve high code coverage at a fraction of the...

Covariance and Contravariance FAQ

In this post I’ll try to answer the most common questions I find on forums and in documentation feedback about C# covariance and contravariance. It’s a big topic for a single blog post, so expect to see a lot of “more information” links. Special thanks to Eric Lippert and Chris Burrows for reviewing and providing helpful comments. ...

Dynamic in C# 4.0: Creating Wrappers with DynamicObject

In the previous post I showed how you can use the new dynamic feature and the ExpandoObject class to add and remove properties at run time, and how this can make your code more readable and flexible than code written with LINQ to XML syntax. But there were some obvious flaws in that example: While ExpandoObject provided better syntax, LINQ to...