By Alice Lee Developing a full-fledged Windows Phone app in one week – that’s pretty ambitious, right? Last week, at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE)’s weekly Summer Cyber Camp, a team of talented high and middle...

By Sam Zaiss Update : We're happy to set anyone up with the new reduced toolbar set, whether you are in the US or not. Unfortunately the rule about the Microsoft gratuity is strict, but if you're willing, we'd still love to get your feedback. Please...

In case you missed it, last week at TechEd 2011 in Atlanta, GA, I gave conference attendees a first look at some of the new IDE features and performance improvements we’re working on for the next version of Visual Studio.  Channel9 has posted the...

The debut episode of the Visual Studio Toolbox , a new Channel 9 series focused on Visual Studio tips and tricks, is now live!  In the first episode, Robert Green walks through the features of the Solution Navigator tool window included in the Productivity...

By Selma Ikiz Would you like Visual Studio 2010 to be even faster? Would you like any performance issue you see to be reported automatically without any hassle? Well now you can, with the new Visual Studio PerfWatson extension! Install this extension...

By Robin Reynolds-Haertle This morning, we released an updated version of the Visual Studio Async CTP (SP1 Refresh) that’s compatible with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and Windows Phone 7! What Is the Visual Studio Async CTP (SP1 Refresh)? The...

“Where can I find a list of patches/QFEs/hotfixes for Visual Studio?”  This question appears quite frequently in blog comments and it wasn’t until recently that I found a web page that lists all the publically released patches for Visual Studio....

By Jack Hu As the word “code-first” implies, the EF 4.1 offers a code centric data programming paradigm. From a coder’s point of view, it requires little effort to map a very clean object model to a database. This style of programming...

We’re pleased to announce a new Quick Find (Ctrl+F) extension in the February release of the Productivity Power Tools . This is the first version of the Quick Find extension and we are planning to make some improvements to it in future Power Tools...

As of this week, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is now available for download! The service pack was released to MSDN subscribers on March 8 and became generally available on March 10. SP1 includes fixes that improve reliability and address the most commonly-reported...

Reseting Your Extensions for the Last Time! We've heard a great deal of feedback on how each update of the Productivity Power Tools re-enables all of the extensions when it installs. If you are careful about installing the Power Tools via the extension...

Do you want to work on a product used by millions of developers around the world? I do! Come join me to deliver Visual Studio, the set of developer tools used across Microsoft and around the world. We have open positions available across Test, Dev and...

For those that haven’t seen it, Eric Lippert finished an amazing 8-part blog series in November on the new Asynchronous Programming APIs slated for the next version of C# and VB.  He shows you how to get started getting started with the CTP and how...

Not many books that are reviewed like this on Amazon: Now the heavily augmented second edition has just come out, written by several people at Microsoft and reviewed by the product team. New extensive coverage of building C++ with MSBuild Complete rewrite...

UPDATE: This issue has been fixed in Visual Studio 11/NETFX45. As always, feedback is welcome! Please leave your comments in this blog post and report any bugs on Microsoft Connect . We've had a few reports of cases where Visual Studio, and previous...

We are pleased to announce the availability of Color Printing as a free extension for Visual Studio 2010! By default, VS 2010 prints only in black and white; this extension restores support for printing code in color. Installation and Setup Installing...

by Yang Xiao Today we are announcing the release to web (RTW) of Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools . This walkthrough demonstrates how easy and convenient it is to develop a VB Windows Phone application using the newly released tools....

In September, there was a post on the blog that introduced the VSPackage Builder , a tool for VS extension developers that provides a designer experience over the Visual Studio Command Table (VSCT) file. In particular, Package Builder makes it easy to...

  We’ve been looking into the widely-reported problem with Visual Studio 2010 where context menus contain scrollbars even when there is sufficient screen real estate to show the menu without one. We’re pleased to announce that there are patches available...

We want to hear from you about how Visual Studio 2010 is working for you so far: "It's been just over 6 months since we launched Visual Studio 2010 in April. I hope you've been busy digging in and taking VS out for a spin. Your feedback was invaluable...

Extension Analyzer is an Extension to Visual Studio 2010 that allows browsing several extensibility entities inside of Visual Studio. It also allows diagnosing several common errors loading extensions by reporting information from logging services inside...

Last week we released the first version of a new project template, VSPackage Builder , which enables rapid development of the command UI and tool window infrastructure of VS 2010 extensions. VSPackage Builder requires VS 2010 Pro or above, and can be...

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...

One of our top reported Microsoft Connect issues since RTM has been that the Find and Replace dialog grows 16px on each use. On repeated use, this can quickly take up your entire screen real estate. We now have a patch available for this issue which you...

With last week’s release of the Productivity Power Tools , we announced a new extension – Quick Access – that allows you to search and execute common tasks within the Visual Studio IDE. You can launch Quick Access by pressing Ctrl+3...