Visual Studio Blog

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

Your Visual Studio, Your Colors

Since releasing Visual Studio 2012 we have continued on our investment in the user experience space to enable you to work more efficiently and to make the Visual Studio experience engaging and productive. One of the design principles we are following is the enablement of choice and personal customization in the product, and as part of ...

NuGet for Windows Store App Developers

In Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8 you’ll see that we have included the popular NuGet package manager by default and customized it to include a Windows 8 packages feed that presents you a filtered list of NuGet packages for use in developing your Windows Store apps. In case you haven’t heard of NuGet - it’s a ...

Visual Studio 2012 SimShip Partners

A month ago we launched Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 at our launch event (http://www.visualstudiolaunch.com) in Seattle. At this event and online, we had a number of sessions showing how Visual Studio 2012 helps you build great applications. We are always looking to ensure that our new tools can be adopted by our users, and have invested in...

Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop is Here

A few months ago, Soma announced plans for a Visual Studio Express 2012 edition for Windows Desktop. Today, we are happy to share that this new Express product is available for download. (You can find the system requirements and download details here.) This post is written by Jennifer Leaf, one of the program managers working on the new ...

New Visual Studio 2012 Debugging Features for the Windows 8 App Lifecycle Model

Windows 8 brings a new app lifecycle model, in which Windows Store apps are automatically managed for the user. These apps always feel alive, even though they never run when they’re off the screen. This provides great benefits for power consumption and battery life. Here are a few related blog posts we recommend for background reading on ...

Visual Studio 2012 released to the web!

On August 15th, we announced the release of Visual Studio 2012 to the web! Make sure to visit Somasegar’s Blog for the announcement, and if you haven’t downloaded yet, check out Jason Zander’s Blog for 12 reasons to upgrade. There was a lot of buzz across the blogs, so here’s a rollup of additional posts you might want to read about ...

Improved Toolbox Performance Delivers Highly Responsive Visual Studio 2012

As mentioned in the previous performance post on Typing and Editing we would follow with a post on the improvements to Visual Studio 2012 from enhancements in the Toolbox. I would like to introduce Duke Kamstra and Chuck England from two teams in Visual Studio to describe to you the work done to improve responsiveness via the Toolbox. ...

A World of Samples at your Fingertips

Samples are the primary way that we as developers learn to develop applications for a new platform. We use samples as a starting point to learn about new APIs, we reference them when we hit bugs in our own code and need a comparison, and we share them for others to learn from our discoveries. If a picture is worth a thousand words then a ...