Visual Studio Blog

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

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 ...

Building Windows Phone 8.1 Apps in HTML

Last week at the BUILD conference, we announced that you can now build apps for Windows Phone 8.1 using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using much the same techniques you use for building Windows 8.1 Store apps today. To help you build these apps, we’ve made many improvements to Visual Studio 2013 and Blend for Visual Studio 2013. In this post, we...

Blend for HTML Behaviors and Actions

Blend for Visual Studio 2013 introduces a feature to HTML developers that may be familiar to those who already work with XAML: Behaviors. When attached to HTML elements, Behaviors add life to an application by executing a JavaScript event handler. Developers can choose from a wide variety of ready-to-use Behaviors or create their own. For ...

Designing pixel perfect layouts in Visual Studio 2013 and Blend

It’s a familiar scenario. You’re developing your application and you’ve got a design in mind. It may have come from a professional designer or a sketch on the back of a cocktail napkin, but you need to move from a concept to a working, implemented design. This can be easier said than done. When your design calls for the baseline of ...

Supercharged Styling: Quickly Finding and Setting a CSS Property in Blend

A core goal of Blend for Visual Studio is to make it fast and easy for developers who care about the quality of their markup to create professional looking apps. One of the many ways that the HTML Designer in Blend can speed up the CSS editing experience when developing Windows Store apps is by providing immediate visual feedback and enabling ...

What’s new for HTML Developers in Blend for Visual Studio 2013

At Windows’ Build conference in June, we introduced Visual Studio and Blend 2013 Preview to the world. With this release, we significantly expanded Visual Studio’s support for creating Window Store Apps using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. In addition to the client-side diagnostics and debugging tools found in Visual Studio, Blend also ...

Overview of Related Files in Blend

Related Files is a feature available in both Blend for Visual Studio 2012 and Blend for Visual Studio 2013 Preview. In this post, I’ll describe how this feature works and how to make the best of it when designing your Windows Store app in HTML. When you are performing styling-related tasks in an HTML document, it is common (if not, ...

What’s new in Visual Studio 2013 Preview for authoring Windows Store XAML apps

Today at BUILD we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 and Blend that brings forward significant advances for authoring XAML-based Windows Store apps for Windows 8.1. This post describes some of the new experiences we are excited to bring to you. In follow up posts, we will describe each of these experiences in greater detail &...