With the release of Visual Studio 11 Beta back in February of this year, we introduced changes to the user experience based on two core design principles, the first being to give you more space for your content and the second being to draw more focus...

UPDATE: We hear you. There’s a lot of excitement about this release and a lot of passion about colors, designs, styles and icons. Know that we are listening to all your comments here, across social media and we are working hard to make Visual Studio...

[ Update 2/9/2010 ] The RC version of the extension is now available (using the same link). Users who installed this extension for Beta 2 and customized the theme for VS2010 Beta 2 : If you have installed VS2010 RC on the same computer, you may experience...

Let’s talk about the all-caps menus. When we shared the RC design preview with you, we expected the uppercase menu would generate mixed feedback and emotions. We had seen similar reactions from early adopters and from our own internal users prior...

Today, we want to share the final product lineup and specifications you can expect to see for the next release of Visual Studio. This also includes system requirements and platform you can develop for with Visual Studio 11. Product Lineup In addition...

We are pleased to announce the availability of Emacs Emulation as a free extension for Visual Studio 2010! This extension provides basic support for Emacs keybindings and text editing commands, very similar to the built-in Emacs keyboard layout in VS...

With Visual Studio 2012, we strive to provide the best development experience across all Microsoft platforms. This includes enabling developers to bring to life the richness of Windows desktop applications - whether you are learning to build your first...

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...

As we’re closing in on the final designs for Visual Studio 11 I want to thank you again for your feedback. I want to pass along that we are still internalizing your feedback and actively working on the next Visual Studio 11 milestones. The purpose...

Today, the Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (Visual Studio 2012.1) is available for download. You can get it now via the Visual Studio 2012.1 download page (see "Visual Studio 2012 Update 1" under the "Additional software" section). For an overview of the...

I was in the middle of creating UI mockups for some extensions I’ve been working on and realized that I needed some icons to polish off the sketch.  Sure, I could have just grabbed a screenshot of VS, opened up my favorite image editor , and pulled...

Today, we're excited to announce that Visual Studio 2012 RC is now available for download on our Visual Studio product website . Since the release of Beta, we’ve been hard at work making final touches, addressing top customer feedback from Beta...

By popular request, the new version of the Productivity Power Tools has arrived for Visual Studio 2012 ! These tools are the fruit of a few passionate engineers on the Visual Studio team that love sharing the power of Visual Studio with customers. The...

[ Update 6/21/2010 ]: Please go to this blog post where I describe even more configuration options that are available for this extension. [ Update 7/20/2010 ]: Updated changes made for version 10.0.10710.22 of the Pro Power Tools. Please take a look at...

UPDATE: This issue is fixed in .NET 4.5. As always, feedback is welcome! Please leave your comments in this blog post and report any bugs on Microsoft Connect . Recently, we’ve seen a number of people reporting problems with resource generation...

Weston Hutchins – Program Manager, Visual Studio Shell Team Short Bio : I started at Microsoft as an intern in 2005 and have been working in Visual Studio ever since. I’m currently a PM on the VS Shell Team. No, not the “ Isolated ” or “ Integrated ”...

This is the first part in a seven part series. Links to the other parts are included at the bottom of this post. Now that the Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2010 is publicly available, we’ve started receiving questions from inquisitive users...

Today we are releasing the first Community Technology Preview of the Roslyn Project ! What is Roslyn? In the past, our compilers have acted as black boxes – you put source text in and out the other end comes an assembly. All of that rich knowledge...

It gives us great pleasure to announce that today at //build/ we launched the Windows Phone 8 development story. We have enhanced the existing Visual Studio 2012 developer tools to support development of Windows Phone 8 apps optimized for a variety of...

This is the fifth article in the WPF in Visual Studio 2010 series . This week, guest author Matthew Johnson presents a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at Visual Studio's innovative window management system. - Paul Harrington Background Several...

If you inspect the contents of a .vcxproj file (the new VC++ project file format in VS2010) in notepad or in VS editor (by first unloading the project and then choosing "Edit Foo.vcxproj" from the context menu in Solution Explorer), you will see that...

I am pleased to announce that we have an updated version of the Productivity Power Tools. With this release, we've introduced 4 brand new extensions and we've fixed many of the bugs that were reported in the previous version. If you have the Productivity...

Hi, I am Richa Prasad and I am the Program Manager for the Project System team. This means that I work on many features for managing projects and solutions. One such feature is the conversion process. We have recently received many requests for making...

We are very excited to announce the first release of Solution Navigator, a new tool that merges functionality from Solution Explorer, Class View, Object Browser, Call Hierarchy, Navigate To, and Find Symbol References into a single view. This view can...

Some customers have been reporting intermittent crashes while using Visual Studio 2010, particularly during file save and build. We haven’t tracked this down completely yet, but many of the crashes seem to be related to an out-of-date version of the AnkhSVN...