Visual Studio Blog

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

Large C# and VB solutions load significantly faster in 15.5 update

On average, 50 percent of all solutions opened by Visual Studio users open in ten seconds or less. However, large solutions can take longer to load because there are a lot of projects that Visual Studio needs to process. Over the last six months, we looked at ways to make solution load much faster, even for large solutions. We are happy to ...

Test Experience Improvements

There have been several significant improvements to the test experience that range across Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team Services. These efforts involved frameworks and tooling for both .NET and C++, but all had a common goal: make testing with our developer tools a great experience. .NET Side-by-side Performance Comparison These ...

Announcing Visual Studio “15” Preview 5

Today we released Visual Studio “15” Preview 5. With this Preview, I want to focus mostly on performance improvements, and in the coming days we’ll have some follow-up posts about the performance gains we’ve seen. I’m also going to point out some of the productivity enhancements we’ve made. So kick off the installer here and ...

Anatomy of a Low Impact Visual Studio Install

In building faster ways of getting VS, we needed to reduce the size of the minimum product, change a bit of the way the IDE itself ran, change the way components are installed on your computer, and reduce the way components can impact your system. In this article, I will share a little about what it took to make this come together.

10 things you should try on the leap day

It’s February 2016 and so those of us on the Gregorian calendar get to enjoy an extra day in the month! What will you do in those 24 bonus hours? How about learning some new tools and technologies? Here are ten great suggestions—OK, eleven! It is a leap year, so it’s a leap list: Get your code hosted for free in ...

Analyze CPU and Memory while Debugging

Would you like to learn how to make your code run faster, use less memory, or just find out whether your code has a CPU or memory issue? Of course you would—you’re a developer! But then, memory and performance tuning often suffers from the pitfall of being an “important but not urgent” task that you simply can’t seem to get to ...

Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 CTP

Today we released Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 CTP. Our focus for this release has been stability and performance, along with responding to feedback you’ve given us on Visual Studio 2015 RTM and Update 1. Here are the biggest things you’ll find in this update: (image) We’ve also added a number of ...

Visual Studio 2015 Diagnostics Investments

When we wrapped up the last release of Visual Studio, I wrote a blog post titled: Visual Studio 2013 Diagnostics Investments, which gathered all the links to our blog posts and other content into a single place. It seems fitting to do the same now that VS2015 has RTM’d, and the same intro I wrote last time applies, so I won’t ...

Improving Setup in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2

A few weeks ago at the Build conference, we released a release candidate of the second update to Visual Studio 2013. This update of Visual Studio contained significant new functionality including being able to create Universal Apps for both Windows and Windows Phone. To be able to target Windows Phone, developers need to use emulators which ...

Asynchronous Solution Load Performance Improvements in Visual Studio 2013

Improving Solution Loads Over the past few years, the Visual Studio team has been working hard to improve Visual Studio performance and scalability when working with large solutions. One area of particular interest to many of you has been our initial solution load times. For Visual Studio 2012, we implemented changes that enabled large ...