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...

In our previous blog post , we introduced the new Find control we are building in Visual Studio. Our goal was to streamline and modernize the vast array of Find experiences and provide a lightweight mechanism to search within documents. With the huge...

Visual Studio 11 Beta introduces a first class JavaScript development experience and provides a rich toolset for developing Windows Metro style apps. Debugging is a crucial part of that toolset. In this post I am going to focus on just some of the new...

A common piece of feedback we’ve gotten is to make it easier to find and acquire bug fixes and updates – basically, how we can bring more improvements to more customers, more promptly, and more easily. As you can imagine, there are many factors...

About two years ago we wrote a blog post entitled Why does Visual Studio 2010 convert my projects? One of the strong pieces of feedback we received was that you wanted to be able to work on your projects using both the current and previous version of...

It’s been just 3 weeks since we released Visual Studio 11 Beta, and we’d like to hear what you think! Let us know your impressions by taking the Visual Studio 11 Beta survey . We do these surveys with most of our releases, and they help...

Welcome back to the 3rd and final part of the Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance series. This week’s topic is Debugging. As I mentioned in the 1st post debugging is a key component in your continuous interaction with Visual Studio and we heard from you...

Welcome back to part 2 of the Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance series. This week’s topic is Solution Load. We received a great deal of feedback from you clearly telling us that it takes too long to get into your code when loading solutions. I would...

Following the //Build conference last year I posted “ Addressing Visual Studio Performance ” to gather your feedback on Visual Studio performance and to discuss with you those areas you felt were important for us to improve. Next, I posted “ An update...

Today, we're excited to announce that Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download . Back in September, we announced the release of Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and detailed the simplification efforts we made across the IDE, integration...

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: 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...

Bring Some Game To Your Code! A software engineer's glory so often goes unnoticed. Attention seems to come either when there are bugs or when the final project ships. But rarely is a developer appreciated for all the nuances and subtleties of a piece...

The Microsoft Visual Studio Design Research Team is looking for participants to give us direct feedback on our development tools, languages and libraries! Opportunities include usability studies of upcoming features, focus groups where we explore new...

The Windows Simulator is a tool provided in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview that helps debugging Metro style applications. Its main purpose is to enable debugging when developers want to test how their applications respond to the new Metro style capabilities...

All of you might be pretty busy discovering what Windows 8 has to offer. Today I will introduce you to debugging Contracts , one of the cool features in Windows 8. It is hard to debug contracts when you are debugging locally because they disappear...

As of today, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is now available through Microsoft Update. If you have opted into Microsoft Update and haven’t installed SP1 yet, you will soon have it offered to you. The service pack was initially released in March and includes...

I wanted to take the time to thank everyone who has contributed to our UserVoice performance site by entering areas you would like to see us improve and for voting on those items. To date we have had over 4700 posts and votes showing the passion you all...

Hello everyone! As you may have heard, today we announced the first CTP of the Roslyn project! You can visit the Roslyn MSDN Page to learn more about the project and to download the CTP. You can also read more about Roslyn at the following links - ...

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...

During usability studies on previous versions of Visual Studio, we found many users were spending quite a lot of time browsing long lists of data from files in Solution Explorer to controls in the Toolbox, errors or warnings in the Error list, menus,...

One of the things we’ve been doing in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview (VS11) is focusing on ways to increase developer productivity and improve the performance of VS. Through careful observation of developers using Visual Studio and through talking...

Have you had a chance to play around with the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview? If so, we’d like to hear your early impressions, particularly around performance, reliability, and quality. Let us know what you think by taking the Visual Studio...

In Visual Studio 2010, we introduced a feature called the Extension Manager – a new dialog that connects to the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery to help a customer easily select and install extensions to Visual Studio from right inside the IDE. ...

The Windows Simulator is a tool provided in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview that enables debugging Metro style applications in scenarios requiring hardware support such as rotation and touch. For a quick introduction to the Windows Simulator, see this...