The Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio shipped last month as a Microsoft DevLabs extension to experiment with some of the latest ideas for setting up and working with a DevOps pipeline. As with any experiment the goal is to learn and test our hypotheses. The enthusiasm and feedback has validated just how much opportunity there is to help developers continuously deliver value to their users. We’ve shipped several incremental updates that fix bugs and other minor usability improvements. Our latest update has several new improvements:

• Support configuring a continuous delivery pipeline for a repository hosted on GitHub
• Improvements that make it simpler to getting started
• Notifications for all Builds you trigger manually, through a CI event or with a PR

Let’s walkthrough some of these improvements.

Configuring Continuous Delivery for a repository hosted on GitHub

After we released the extension one of the first items users asked about was how do I use this extension to setup a continuous delivery pipeline if my code doesn’t live in a Git repository on Visual Studio Team Services? GitHub and TFVC were the two most popular requests. This update adds support for Git repositories on GitHub and we’re looking at adding support for TFVC in the future.

If you have the GitHub extension for Visual Studio installed, the ‘Add to Source Control’ button in the status bar will setup a repo and push your code up to GitHub in a couple clicks.

Then, right click on your ASP.NET project in Solution Explorer and select “Configure Continuous Delivery…”. The wizard has a new field to enter your GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) so Team Services can listen for commits and trigger a build & release whenever code is pushed into the GitHub repository.

Another observation from the first release was some users were not able to successfully setup a Continuous Delivery pipeline. When we dug in to the data, we found many users were failing because they were missing one of the prerequisites needed to get everything setup on VSTS. Some common case were users running the wizard on projects that were not under version control or users who did not have an Azure Subscription. We’ve made some improvements to help users with those prerequisites and over time we’ll integrate them directly into the experience so it’s all one step.

Notifications for builds you trigger manually, through a CI or with a PR

We heard lots of feedback around what DevOps activities should produce a notification in the IDE as well as when and where they should appear. Some users wanted to track all CI results. Some users wanted only failures. Some wanted failure results for specific projects. It was clear throughout the feedback that configuration would be critical to meet the broad set of requirements. Notifications for events “I” triggered was as theme that resonated with most users we interviewed.

In this update, we’ve pivoted our notification experience to generate failed, fixed, or success notifications for all builds you triggered in Team Project for your active repository. Now you’ll see a notification the first time you Configure a Continuous Delivery pipeline using the extension and then every time you trigger a build which can happen automatically with a code push or pull request, or manually from Team Services. We’ve also started investigating how we can offer a more complete configuration experience on Team Services that will expand the set of notifications you can receive in the IDE.

It’s all about feedback

First, a thank you to everyone who has reached out and shared feedback and ideas so far. We’re always looking for feedback on where to take this Microsoft DevLabs extension next. There’s a Slack channel and a team alias vsdevops@microsoft.com where you can reach out to the team and others in the community sharing ideas on this topic.

Anthony Cangialosi, Principal PM Manager, Visual Studio Platform IDE @ACangialosiAnthony has focused his career at Microsoft on building developer technologies. He is the program manager for Visual Studio’s Connected experiences and IDE. Anthony joined the Visual Studio team in 2001 and has contributed experiences across the IDE including VS’s identity infrastructure the Shell, the VS SDK, Ecosystem, VSIP, and mobile device development

Performance was a big focus area for Visual Studio 2017, with improvements in many areas, including:

• Faster installation
• Faster first launch after installing and faster subsequent startups.
• Faster solution load times for both C++ and C#
• Faster Git operations including fetching the latest version and viewing history
• Faster “F5” to start debugging your applications

There are also some notable improvements in terms of memory usage in key scenarios, which should significantly reduce out of memory crashes (you can now open very large solutions; solutions that were simply impossible to open in previous versions). And VS 2017 has better identification of extensions or tool windows that may be slowing down key scenarios like startup, solution load and typing.

Start your coding faster with faster startup and solution load

Right after installation, you will notice that it is now significantly faster to launch Visual Studio 2017 for the first time. Most users should find that it is now up to 3 times faster to start working with Visual Studio after installation compared to Visual Studio 2015.

Granted, this is a one-time thing for most customers, so we’ve also made significant improvements elsewhere.

We also made several improvements across different components to ensure subsequent startups are faster by reducing what’s loaded at startup. Some major examples include optimization of Xamarin and Python tooling components to only load when relevant projects are opened. We also added a new feature to help you understand which extensions and tool windows are impacting startup and solution load to give your better control of your Visual Studio environment. We have more details about this below.

You will continue to see improvements as you load your solution to start coding in Visual Studio 2017. We have two new features that will allow you to load your complete solution significantly faster compared to previous versions.

• For C++ based projects, Visual Studio now utilizes a SQLite database to cache information to help open projects faster on all subsequent loads after the first. At the same time, there are improvements in project load time in cases where the cache is not present. These improvements allow Visual Studio 2017 to load LLVM solution 4 times faster compared to Visual Studio 2015 when you use “vcxproj” projects. You can read more about these improvements on the Visual C++ Team’s blog.
• For other projects, we took a new approach to solutions in Visual Studio. We started with the question “Can we support the most commonly used features without actually loading the entire solution?” The result is a feature called “Lightweight Solution Load.” It defers loading of projects as much as possible while still providing the most commonly used features without projects being loaded. For example, using “Lightweight Solution Load”, Roslyn’s compiler solution from GitHub loads 3 times faster now.

Work better with Git source control

There have been significant improvements in the Git source control provider. Most of these improvements are the result of an architectural change in the Git provider to utilize Git.exe instead of the libGit2 library which provided both performance and memory benefits. You can immediately notice these improvements when cloning a Git repo; for example, it is now 3 times faster to clone the Roslyn repo from GitHub.

In addition to making many source control operations faster, we wanted to make sure to highlight one more scenario that was a top user issue before: switching branches for projects under source control. In Visual Studio 2017, you will notice that responding to branch and source file changes is a lot faster because we offer the option to reload the entire solution instead of reloading individual projects. Previously unload and reloading of individual projects one by one could have resulted in unnecessary work as each project reload resulted in an expensive dependency calculation. Reloading the entire solution avoids these issues and ensures projects are loaded efficiently.

More responsive editing and debugging

In addition to the improvements above, there are numerous other improvements around language services, debugging and test experiences to ensure you have a more responsive editing and debugging environment in Visual Studio 2017.

Some highlights are:

• Better utilization of memory for users working with C#, Visual Basic and TypeScript projects, by moving parts of the language service out of process. This not only allows you to work with larger solutions in Visual Studio, but also improves typing responsiveness because of reduced GC times in the Visual Studio process.
• Faster configuration switching when working with managed and native projects either using “Lightweight Solution Load” or normal solution mode. For example, changing configuration in Roslyn’s Compilers solution while using Lightweight Solution Load is now up to 10 times faster.
• Removal of the hosting process from managed projects and significant improvements in start debugging. These fixes reduce responsiveness issues when loading projects or stopping debugging. Improvements in the start debugging scenario were made to offset the gains the hosting process provided, but they also apply to cases where the hosting process was not used. If you were not utilizing the hosting process in your projects before, these improvements will mean debugging will start faster in Visual Studio 2017.
• Added a new linker switch /Debug:fastlink to speed up incremental developer builds to support a faster edit/build/debug flow for C++ projects.
• Improved the C++ debugger to handle symbols better, allowing users to debug larger projects with lots of symbols loaded.
• Improvements to XAML editing performance and faster switching between designer tabs for UWP and XAML developers.
• Various responsiveness fixes based on telemetry to improve test discovery times and related responsiveness issues for test projects.

Be informed about your Visual Studio environment

We also wanted to show you information about performance issues as they occur. For this reason, we added a set of features to help you understand what is impacting certain key scenarios and provide workarounds where possible.

• You can go to the Help -> Manage Visual Studio Performance dialog to see which extensions and tool windows are impacting startup, solution load and typing. You might also see a notification in the IDE if we detect an extension is causing significant performance issues. You can find more details about this in the feature documentation.

• You will also see a notification from the debugger regarding function evaluations that are slow and causing unexpected debugger terminations, to help improve debugging experience.
• Similarly, the debugger will also notify you if your debugging experience can be improved by loading fewer symbols.

Try Visual Studio 2017 and let us know

We welcome you to try Visual Studio 2017 either with your own projects or with the LLVM and Roslyn Compilers projects we used as examples above and see how it compares to Visual Studio 2015 for your scenarios. We are always looking for more feedback to know which improvements are working for you, which ones are not and which areas we should focus on next.

If you are seeing performance issues, please send us feedback through Visual Studio’s Report a Problem tool that you can access from Help -> Send Feedback -> Report a problem. This tool will ensure that we have the right set of data to help us analyze the issue.

In the upcoming weeks, we will share more details about how we utilize customer feedback and product telemetry to work on performance improvements, tips and tricks to help optimize performance for certain scenarios and more details on some improvements summarized above.

Bertan Aygun, Principal Software Engineer, Visual Studio Bertan works on Visual Studio IDE Performance and Reliability team, focusing on startup performance and UI responsiveness. He has been at Microsoft since 2005 working on Visual Studio most of the time.

We’ve released an update to Visual Studio 2017 and you can download it and start using it today.

In this update, which will show up in Help/About as 15.1 (26403.0), we’ve added support for the Windows 10 Creators Update SDK, added support in Xamarin Workbooks for C# 7, and updated the Redgate Data Tools. There is also a set of performance improvements you can read about in Bertan’s post, Visual Studio 2017 Performance Improvements. For a more complete list of features and changes for this update, please read our release notes.

Windows 10 Creators Update

The Universal Windows Platform Tools have been updated to add support for the upcoming Windows Creators Update. Along with the inclusion of the new Windows 10 Creators Update SDK, we made several improvements, such as an updated  .NET Native compiler, PackageReference support for UWP projects targeting the Creators Update, XAML IntelliSense warnings for types and properties that are not available on all Windows versions, support for creation of streaming install packages, as well as creation of optional packages and related sets.

To get started building Windows apps with the Creators Update SDK, read the instructions at this post.

Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin

Xamarin Workbooks provides a blend of documentation and code that is perfect for experimentation, learning, and creating guides. In this update, we’ve added support for C# 7 with Roslyn 2.0. So go ahead and try the newest features available in C# 7 by exploring with a workbook.

We’ve also improved Xamarin’s memory usage and reduced our disk space footprint so that Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android tools are more lightweight and efficient.

Redgate Data Tools

Visual Studio 2017 includes the Redgate Data Tools to help you extend DevOps processes to SQL Server databases. SQL Prompt Core is available in the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio 2017 and improves your productivity with advanced IntelliSense-style SQL code completion. With this update to Visual Studio, code completion now works with queries opened outside of the SQL Server Object Explorer. We’ve also added a new link to our SQL Prompt Help menu so you can share your feedback directly with Redgate.

ReadyRoll Core is also available in the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio 2017 and is a migrations-first database development and deployment tool inside Visual Studio, allowing you to extend DevOps processes to your SQL Server and Azure SQL databases. With this update, we’ve added support for Azure SQL Database temporal tables. To our customers using TFS/VSTS Build and Release, we’ve released an update to the VSTS extension with improved messages and formatted, color-coded TSQL for deployment scripts, which makes it easier for you to manage and deploy database changes.

For more information about Redgate Data Tools, visit Redgate.

Share Your Feedback With Us

As always, we welcome your thoughts and concerns. For issues, let us know via the Report a Problem tool in Visual Studio. You’ll be able to track your issues in the Visual Studio Developer Community where you can ask questions and find answers. For suggestions, share with us through UserVoice.

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management, Visual Studio @JohnMontJohn is responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, and .NET. John has been at Microsoft for 17 years, working in developer technologies the whole time.

In line with our ten-year support policy, Visual Studio 2008, its associated products, runtimes, and components will cease to be supported from April 10, 2018. Though your Visual Studio 2008 applications will continue to work, we encourage you to port, migrate, and upgrade your Visual Studio projects over the next year, to ensure you continue to receive support. Visit visualstudio.com to get the most up-to-date version of Visual Studio.

Microsoft will no longer provide security updates, technical support, or hotfixes when support ends on April 10, 2018, for the following products:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (All editions)
• Microsoft Visual C# 2008 (All editions)
• Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 (All editions)
• Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 (All editions)
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 (All editions)
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Load Agent
• Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition

All later versions of Visual Studio products will continue to be supported for the duration of their established support lifecycles. More information on these products is available on the Servicing for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server products page.

You can also check out the lifecycle information for .NET, C++ and Windows components on the Microsoft Support Lifecycle site.

Lastly, Microsoft Visual J# Version 2.0 Redistributable Package Second Edition will also cease to be supported on October 10, 2017.

The best way to continue to get full support for Visual Studio products is to upgrade to the latest versions. Visit VisualStudio.com for information on the latest Visual Studio products.

Deniz Duncan, Program Manager, Visual Studio Deniz is a program manager in the Visual Studio release engineering team, responsible for making Visual Studio available around the world. Prior to joining Microsoft in Redmond, Deniz worked with Microsoft’s enterprise customers in Australia. She is passionate about the customer experience and ensuring we release tools & features developers need, want and love to use.

In November, we announced Visual Studio for Mac, a fully featured IDE that we hope will help every Mac developer create mobile and cloud applications. We started with a solid foundation for mobile development using Xamarin, and cloud development using .NET Core.

Over the past few months we have been working on porting C# code that was originally designed to work on Windows to the Mac. Luckily for us, the architecture of Visual Studio is so good that reusing the code has been a breeze. This has been helped by both the love and dedication that our Mac and Windows teams have, to create a great developer experience for our users.

Here are some of the changes that we have made since then.

Web Editing

In the latest release, we have completed the work to bring the rich HTML, CSS and JSON editors to macOS. You will get the same code completion, indentation behavior, and validation that you get on Windows for those file formats. When you install the update today, you will get to enjoy the glory of an IDE with a state-of-the-art web editor.

.NET Core

We have polished and improved our .NET Core and ASP.NET Core support to make it even simpler to create your server code, either for your standalone web sites, or as a service backend for your mobile applications or your hosted services.

We have upgraded our debugger to make async debugging as natural and simple as regular code – just like you expect from Visual Studio on Windows.

Azure Publish

To complement our improved .NET Core support, you can now publish your applications directly to Azure from within Visual Studio for Mac. Using the same publishing profiles and commands that you are used to.

C# 7

We also introduced support for C# 7.0, a big upgrade with many language improvements that you will love. The support is what you expect from Visual Studio with refactoring tools, live code checking and great IntelliSense.

It is hard to pick favorite features in C# 7. I love pattern matching and I love the new native tuple support. Local functions, while not immediately obvious, has made some of my own code simpler and cleaner.

Support for the latest Apple and Google platforms

As you have come to expect from us, we deliver first-class support for the latest versions of Apple and Google operating systems – including the just updated versions of macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS.

Additionally, we are taking away some of the complexity involved in managing the signing certificates and provisioning profiles for your Apple-based applications, by integrating with the popular open source Fastlane project.

Accessibility

Visual Studio now integrates with Apple’s macOS accessibility platform. We are committed to making the entire IDE accessible and we are very happy with the first steps that we have taken in this space.

Testing

I hope that you take some time to try out the new features in Visual Studio for Mac and share your experiences with us. My team is committed to delivering developer tools that delight developers. We want to hear from you, and find out what parts of the experience can be improved and how we can make you more effective mobile and cloud developers.

If you already have Visual Studio for Mac Preview installed, make sure you update to the latest version from within the app. If you haven’t tried out a preview yet, head on over to VisualStudio.com to download the latest one.

Use Visual Studio for Mac’s “Report a Problem” or “Provide a Suggestion” dialog (within the Help menu) to provide feedback. Also, don’t forget about our Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac community forums, which provide a great place to leave feedback and learn from other developers.

Enjoy!

Miguel.

Miguel de Icaza, Distinguished Engineer, Mobile Developer Tools Miguel is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, focused on the mobile platform and creating delightful developer tools. With Nat Friedman, he co-founded both Xamarin in 2011 and Ximian in 1999. Before that, Miguel co-founded the GNOME project in 1997 and has directed the Mono project since its creation in 2001, including multiple Mono releases at Novell. Miguel has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Free Software Award, the MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year Award in 1999, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 innovators for the new century in September 2000.

Today we are releasing Visual Studio 2017 Preview 15.2. For information on what this preview contains, please refer to the Visual Studio 2017 Preview release notes.

If you haven’t heard about our new Preview releases, do take a few minutes to learn about them on the Visual Studio Preview page on visualstudio.com.

As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Report a Problem option in the upper right corner, either from the installer or the Visual Studio IDE itself. Track your feedback on the developer community portal. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.

Sarika Calla, Principal Program Manager, Visual Studio Sarika Calla runs the Visual Studio release engineering team with responsibility for making Visual Studio releases available to our customers around the world.

Today we are happy to announce that new offline books for Visual Studio 2017 are now available for download. Now you can easily download content published on MSDN and Docs for consumption on-the-go, without needing an active internet connection. We are also hosting the book generation and fetching services entirely on Microsoft Azure, which makes them more performant and reliable – we will be continuously updating the content, so you will no longer be stuck with outdated books and wait 6 months for the next release. The process to create and update an offline book now takes hours instead of months!

The new offline books continue to integrate directly with Visual Studio, allowing you to rely on the familiar in-context help (F1) and many features of the Help Viewer, such as indexed search, favorites and tables of contents that mirror those of online pages.

Adding Help Viewer to your Visual Studio installation

Starting with Visual Studio 2017, Help Viewer is now an optional component that you have to manually select during installation. With the new Visual Studio installer, this is a two-click process: simply select Individual Components, and click on Help Viewer under Code tools.

Available Books

In addition to your usual developer content, such as books covering Visual C#, Visual F# and others, we have added brand new content to the list, including:

• ASP.NET Core
• ASP.NET API Reference
• NuGet
• Scripting Language Reference

All these books are available in the Manage Content section of Help Viewer – click on Add next to the books that you are interested in and select Update at the bottom of the screen.

Feedback

We are constantly looking to improve our offline content story. If you encounter any issues with the Help Viewer app, let us know via the Report a Problem option in the installer or in Visual Studio itself. If you have any suggestions, bug reports or ideas related to the content in offline books, please submit them on our UserVoice site – we will address them as soon as possible!

Den Delimarsky, Program Manager, docs.microsoft.com @DennisCode Den drives the .NET, UWP and sample code experiences on docs.microsoft.com. He can be found occasionally writing about security and bots on his blog.

Over the last few updates we’ve been working on evening out our support for popular scenarios. Earlier this month we added support for setting up an automated DevOps pipeline in VSTS that pulls source from a public or private GitHub repository. TFVC is another scenario we’re working on to round out the extension. This update continues to round out the Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio extension by adding support for automating the build and deployment of an ASP.NET Core application targeting Azure app services. Now the extension can configure a VSTS build and release definition that can automatically build, test, and deploy any ASP.NET 4.x or ASP.NET Core application. We’ve also continued to fixed bugs we’ve gotten from the community. Thank!

Configuring Continuous Delivery for an ASP.NET Core project

To configure Continuous Delivery for ASP.NET Core projects, open a solution with an ASP.NET Core project and click on the Configure Continuous Delivery command in the Build menu. If the solution is not already under source control, the extension will guide you through the process.

The Configure Continuous Delivery dialog is pre-populated with a list of Azure subscriptions and App Services available to the personalization currently selected in Visual Studio. The default configuration is a new App Service configuration with a S1 service plan but you can pick an existing app service as well.

Click OK and the extension will use the selected app service or create a new one on Azure, then call VSTS to create a build and release definition for the repository on VSTS or GitHub. Now each time you push a new commit a build will start automatically and if that’s successful VSTS deploys the app to the target App Service on Azure.

Of course if the build fails you’ll get a notification. Clicking the notification will take you to VSTS where you investigate the results.

Please keep the feedback coming!

Thank you to everyone who has reached out and shared feedback and ideas so far. We’re always looking for feedback on where to take this Microsoft DevLabs extension next. There’s a Slack channel and a team alias vsdevops@microsoft.com where you can reach out to the team and others in the community sharing ideas on this topic.

Ahmed Metwally, Senior PM, Visual Studio @cd4vs Ahmed is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Platform team focused on improving team collaboration and application lifecycle management integration.

More than ever, organizations are relying on developers to create breakthrough experiences. From start-ups to enterprises to government agencies, developers are creating new digital experiences that are redefining organizations to empower us all. The cloud is a key enabler for this era, bringing powerful, new technology to developers across the globe. But, the cloud also brings with it an unprecedented pace of technology releases and heightened expectations on developers to deliver breakthrough experiences all the time. It is this understanding that shapes how we build and deliver Microsoft Azure.

This morning, at Microsoft Build conference, in Seattle, I talked about a core design principle for Azure – helping guide your success. Providing powerful tech and lots of new features is necessary, but not sufficient – it is how you achieve success with the cloud that matters most. The cloud is no longer about just who has more features; it’s about how successful you can be with the cloud. To deliver on this principle, we focus Azure innovation on your needs – making cutting edge technology approachable to all developers, and doing the heavy lifting to ensure Azure uniquely meets enterprise scenarios. Trust is and one of our core values, we will continue to lead the industry in our work on security, compliance, privacy, and responsibility. And, Azure is designed for your results, ensuring you have proven guidance, expert advice, and support. With these core tenets, every developer can be successful with Azure – it is this goal the Azure team focuses on delivering every day.

For you to be successful, the cloud and the development tools also must work seamlessly together, which is why we ensure great experiences across Azure and the Visual Studio family. Whether it is Visual Studio Enterprise, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Code – we are committed to providing the most productive developer experience end-to-end. To this end, today we announced the general availability of Visual Studio for Mac.

Visual Studio for Mac brings the integrated development environment (IDE) loved by millions to the Mac. Developers get a great IDE and a single environment to not only work on end-to-end solutions – from mobile and web apps to games – but also to integrate with and deploy to Azure. Whether you use C#, F#, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Xamarin or Unity, you’ll get a best-in-class development environment, natively designed for the Mac.

Get started with Visual Studio for Mac: aka.ms/vs4mac

In complement to the IDE and the Azure Portal, we streamlined the experience of working with Azure from the command line. The new Azure Cloud Shell provides an authenticated, browser-based shell experience hosted in Azure and is accessible from anywhere. Azure takes care of managing and updating Cloud Shell with commonly used command line tools and support for multiple popular programming languages, so that you can stay productive. Each Cloud Shell session provides a ready-to-use environment automatically synced to a $Home directory that is stored in Azure to enable persisting files such as your favorite automation scripts. Azure Cloud Shell maximizes versatility and productivity.

Data is a core part of every app and experience developers deliver today. I know that every developer has their database preferences – some love SQL Server, some love MySQL and PostgreSQL. Increasingly, developers want to move to database as a service options, to maximize productivity. Azure is making it possible to develop using any database you prefer and use it as a service. Today, we announced a new service that seamlessly migrates 3^rd party and SQL Server databases into Azure SQL Database with near-zero application downtime. Additionally, we announced the availability of both Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL options in Azure, to ensure developers can use their favorite database with Azure. These new Azure database offerings run as a service and therefore provide high-availability, data protection and recovery, and scale without downtime – all built-in at no extra cost or configuration.

But, data isn’t just a core part of apps – increasingly it’s becoming the most mission critical aspect and fundamental to developing intelligent apps. As cloud-based applications increasingly scale, reach global users, and power AI experiences, we have come to a place where we need data at planet scale. Today, we announced Azure Cosmos DB, the first globally distributed, multi-model database service delivering turkey global distribution out with guaranteed uptime and millisecond latency at the 99^th percentile. While most database services force you to choose between strong or eventual consistency, Azure Cosmos DB is the only globally distributed database service which offers five well-defined, intuitive consistency choices – so you can select just the right one for your app. These breakthrough capabilities are made possible with the foundational work of Leslie Lamport, Turing Award winner and Microsoft Researcher.

Azure Cosmos DB allows you to elastically scale across any number of geographical regions while delivering the industry’s only financially-backed database SLAs across availability, latency, throughput, and consistency. As the first and only schema-agnostic database, Azure Cosmos DB automatically indexes data so you can perform blazing fast queries without having to deal with complexities of schema and index management or schema migration in a globally distributed setup. Customers including Jet.com are using Azure Cosmos DB to scale to 100 trillion transactions per day and growing, spanning multiple regions. Tapping into Azure Cosmos DB gives them planet scale, so they can keep focused on growing their business.

Beyond data, I continue to talk with developers about the challenges of modernizing existing applications. New container and microservice technologies have incredible benefit, but can require rewriting apps – a luxury most developers don’t have. We’ve been working hard to address this need with Azure. Today, we enable you to use your choice of container orchestration technology including Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Mesos DC/OS with Azure Container Service, which allows you flexibility to use containers exactly how you need.

Additionally, we’ve also been working hard to help you containerize existing .NET apps and deploy them to Azure. Today we’re extending this scenario to Azure Service Fabric. Service Fabric is a powerful microservices platform that supports the ability to run both Windows and Linux based containers. Today, we are updating Service Fabric to natively support Docker Compose for deploying multi-container applications to Service Fabric. This makes it easy to build microservice based solutions that can leverage the best of the Windows ecosystem and the best of the Linux based ecosystem – all while easily using the existing code you have. We’re announcing the general availability of container support for Windows Server containers in Azure Service Fabric with the 5.6 runtime and 2.6 SDK release. We’re also previewing Service Fabric support for Docker Compose for deploying containerized apps. And, with the Visual Studio Team Services integration, you can realize continuous integration and deployment of these containerized applications integration.

Beyond these advancements, we are also continuing to help you innovate with serverless computing – event-driven programming in a fully managed environment – using Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps. Microsoft’s serverless offering uniquely includes rich tooling support with Visual Studio, seamless workflow and systems integrations, and built-in DevOps with Visual Studio Team Services, GitHub, and Bitbucket. Today, I’m excited to announce the next step that provides the most productive serverless development experience on the planet. Azure Functions Visual Studio tooling preview, available as a Visual Studio 2017 extension, creates an integrated developer experience. These tools allow you to integrate Azure Functions development seamlessly into development flows: leveraging 3rd party extensions, testing frameworks, and continuous integration systems. Azure Application Insights support for Azure Functions preview provides better intelligence about Azure Functions code, allowing teams to measure performance, detect issues, and diagnose the source of the problem with serverless apps. Also, we know you want the flexibility to deploy your code everywhere. Azure Functions Runtime preview extends the innovations in Azure Functions to on-premises or anywhere outside of the Azure cloud. Developers can leverage the serverless programming model and bindings on-premises while future-proofing their code assets. Together, these capabilities provide an unmatched developer experience, helping every developer successfully and efficiently build serverless solutions.

Developer success is, of course, founded on technology, but just as important is business growth around these developer solutions. This is particularly true of companies providing SaaS solutions. Azure provides a fantastic cloud platform for SaaS based offerings, but beyond this, Microsoft can also help these SaaS providers grow their business. We recently announced that Office 365 has reached 100 million monthly active users. Azure provides the easiest way for SaaS solutions to integrate with Office 365 and reach those 100 million active users and grow their business. By integrating with Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft PowerApps, SaaS providers can create a seamless, integrated experience for their customers, making them even more valuable. One of the key capabilities Microsoft has is the largest global sales force. For SaaS providers built on Azure, we will now enable them to publish PowerApps and Flow connectors that Office 365 enterprise customers can use at no extra charge, to integrate the solutions into their productivity workflow. Also for these providers using Microsoft AppSource and qualified for our co-sell program, the Microsoft sales force will be compensated to help sell these SaaS solutions into the accounts they cover. The combination of these investments for SaaS companies, provide incredible opportunity to grow their business, and yet another example of how we’re working hard to guide every developer to success.

In addition to these exciting advancements I talked about onstage, we rolled out even more innovation across our developer tooling and cloud today – all with the aim of helping every developer create transformative experiences with Azure:

• .NET Core 2.0 Preview allows developers to use .NET Standard 2.0’s expanded set of uniform APIs – including XML, Serialization, Networking, IO, and thousands more –  to write once and run on multiple .NET runtimes (.NET Framework, .NET Core, Xamarin and Universal Windows Platform).
• ASP.NET Core 2.0 Preview’s new capabilities include Razor Pages, a lightweight syntax for combining server code with HTML, streamlined startup, even more performance improvements – and ASP.NET Core 2.0 web apps can now leverage automatic Azure diagnostics and monitoring, without requiring developers to write any code or republish the application.
• Visual Studio 2017 version 15.2 delivers bug fixes and new functionality that was not previously available in the past releases, including the return of Python workload and Data Science workload (includes R, Python, and F#) and added support for Typescript 2.2.
• Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 Preview includes bug fixes, improvements in accessibility, and new functionality; most notably .NET Core 2.0 preview support, Live Unit Testing for .NET Core projects, more C++ standard conformance, enhancement in continuous delivery for ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core projects targeting an Azure App Services, and improvements in container development tools.
• Visual Studio Snapshot Debugger, our new cloud debugging experience, gives developers deep insight into cloud production code behavior at the time of an exception, without writing extensive logging statements or exception handling code.
• Azure Batch Rendering offers an easy way to help scale rendering jobs using market leading applications like Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya.  Teaming up with Autodesk, Azure is the first public cloud to offer this seamless integration across, client application, licensing, orchestration and infrastructure.
• Low-priority Batch for Linux and Windows VMs introduces access to surplus capacity using Azure Batch. At discounts up to 80%, Low-priority Batch increases the flexibility and cost-control for large-scale workloads, allowing you to mix and match low-priority and on-demand VMs.
• New capabilities for VM maintenance and availability, including Scheduled events and instance metadata API General Availability. With this new feature, applications running in a VM can learn about upcoming updates. In the rare case that maintenance requires VM reboots or redeploy, we now offer the capability for customers to select a timeframe within a 30-day window to schedule the maintenance. We can now also detect and predict some imminent hardware failures, and perform VM live migration to another server to avoid disruption to you.
• Storage Service Encryption for Azure Files on all available redundancy types (LRS and GRS) at no additional cost, that ensures that all data being stored in Azure Files is encrypted using AES-256.
• New Azure Service Catalog to enable organizations to package and curate managed applications approved for an organization’s use.
• Managed disks support for Azure DevTest Labs including VM OS disks, data disks, and custom images that makes storage and cost management easier.
• Azure Functions with Common Data Service is available in preview, to create and use Azure Functions with Common Data Service (CDS) to extend the functionality of apps.
• Azure SQL Database enhancements including Managed Instance private preview, which offers SQL Server instance-level compatibility like VNET, SQL Agent, 3-part names, and CDC, making it even easier for you to migrate SQL Server apps to Azure SQL Database. We also announced preview coming soon for Graph support and General Availability for Threat Detection.
• General Availability of Azure HDInsight 3.6 backed by our enterprise grade SLA. HDInsight 3.6 brings the latest versions of various open source components in Apache Hadoop & Spark eco-system to the cloud, allowing you to deploy them easily and run them reliably on an enterprise grade platform.
• New previews of Azure Accelerated Network to reduce network latency and VM overhead by off-loading the VM network interface to an FPGA.
• CDN Enhanced Integrations with App Services and Storage so you can add CDN to your Azure web app service or Azure storage account without leaving the respective portal experience.

Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Group As executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Group, Scott Guthrie is responsible for the company’s cloud infrastructure, server, database, CRM, ERP, management and development tools businesses. His engineering team builds Microsoft Azure, SQL Server, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Active Directory, System Center, Visual Studio and .NET.

In his Build 2017 keynote, Scott Guthrie made several announcements across partnerships, new Azure service capabilities, and the Visual Studio family. If you didn’t get a chance to watch the keynote, check out ScottGu’s blog post. The recording of the keynote should be available later. From a Visual Studio product family perspective, the significant announcements are:

• The general availability of Visual Studio for Mac
• Visual Studio 2017 version 15.2
• Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 preview
• A preview of .NET Standard 2.0 support in .NET Core

Here’s a little more about each of these announcements.

Visual Studio for Mac

Among the Visual Studio announcements, the most prominent was the general availability of Visual Studio for Mac. If you use a Mac as your dev machine, I recommend downloading Visual Studio for Mac as you read the rest of this post.

Visual Studio for Mac is an end-to-end solution for developers on macOS looking for high productivity and seamless coordination across teams of any size. It includes full support for mobile, web, and cloud workloads, as well as game development support with Unity 5.6.1. The release we’re making available today enables developers to create mobile apps with Xamarin and C#, including creating a mobile backend with ASP.NET Core. For web application developers, it includes full support for ASP.NET Core, HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, with the same great web tooling support you already know and love in Visual Studio. Brand new is the addition to develop and debug Unity games, with a Unity-specific solution explorer view, as well as syntax highlighting for script. Read the post from Miguel that has in-depth coverage of Visual Studio for Mac. Check out the Visual Studio for Mac release notes to get the complete list of features.

In addition to the GA release, we’ll be making previews available soon with support for Docker, Azure Functions and IoT devices like Android Things.

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.2

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.2 is now available for download. This release delivers both bug fixes and new functionality. If you are an existing Visual Studio 2017 user, you will be notified of the availability of the update within the IDE. Learn how to get the latest updates.

Highlights in this release include the addition of the Python Workload and Data Science Workload (which includes R, Python, and F#), support for TypeScript 2.2, an update to install Unity 5.6 in the game workload and support for Xamarin 4.5 with Android SDK Manager (managing Android SDKs from Visual Studio). We also made feature improvements to the C++ Linux tools and RedGate ReadyRoll is now integrated into the Data workload. Check out the Visual Studio 2017 release notes for the complete list of features and bug fixes.

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 preview

Today, we are also making available Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 preview. Download Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 preview to try it. If you already have it installed, check out these steps on how to keep your preview up to date. 15.3 preview delivers bug fixes, improvements in accessibility, and new functionality. Some of the notable features included in this preview are .NET Core 2.0 preview support (including some Visual Basic and F#), support for Windows Nano and Linux Docker containers, and Nano debugging support for Docker. You can now easily configure Office 365 services using Microsoft Graph from Connected Services. Additionally, this preview has improvements to Live Unit Testing (e.g. support for .NET Core and improvements to usability with large solutions). In addition, this preview includes more C++ standard conformance. The Visual Studio 2017 Preview 15.3 release notes have a complete list.

Please note, preview releases are designed to provide you a peek into what we have in the pipeline and are not recommended for use in production environments. The preview can be installed side by side with the released version of Visual Studio. This means you can use Visual Studio 2017 for your stable production work and Visual Studio 2017 Update Preview to get access to the upcoming new features.

.NET Standard 2.0 Support in .NET Core 2.0 Preview

In the .NET world, we released a preview of .NET Core 2.0 with support for .NET Standard 2.0. .NET Standard defines a uniform set of APIs for all .NET platforms so developers can write once and run on multiple .NET runtimes. .NET Standard 2.0 adds support for XML, Serialization, Networking, IO, and more. It now contains over 2500 types and 33,000 members.

The .NET Core 2.0 release also consolidates .NET Core into one package reference. And we updated Visual Studio Live Unit Testing and CodeLens to support .NET Core projects in the 15.3 preview. We have also released ASP.NET Core 2.0 preview today in the Visual Studio 2017 (version 15.3 preview), which now includes SignalR for real-time web functionality based on WebSockets, as well as Web Pages using Razor syntax, a lightweight syntax for combining server code with HTML. .NET Core 2.0 Preview is a separate install but it requires the preview of Visual Studio 2017 (version 15.3) to be installed first. Download .NET Core 2.0 preview.

New benefits for Visual Studio Subscribers

Finally, we announced the availability of a new learning benefit for Visual Studio subscribers: Opsgility. Opsgility is a Microsoft cloud technology trainer for developers and IT professionals, built around a network of industry experts and technical authors that includes MVPs and Microsoft Insiders in more than 10 countries. Starting today, Visual Studio Professional subscribers are entitled to a 6-month membership plan to Opsgility full catalog including on-demand content and hands-on-labs. At the same time, Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers can unlock a full year of Opsgility course catalog and full lab guides, up to 4 hours of cloud readiness planning session with a Senior Cloud Solution Architect and a team subscription with up to 5 licenses. Subscribers just need to sign in to My Visual Studio portal (http://my.visualstudio.com) to activate their new Opsgility benefit. Check back on this blog for a detailed post on this topic.

Try it out and please give feedback

Today we announced the availability of both Visual Studio 2017 version 15.2 as well as Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 preview. Download both today!

Visual Studio 2017 15.2 and Visual Studio 2017 Preview 15.3 have a lot of new and improved features for you to try. For the complete list of what is included in this release, along with some known issues, check out the Visual Studio 2017 Release Notes.

If you have further questions, read the Visual Studio 2017 FAQ for other commonly asked questions. Want to know more about compatibility, check out Visual Studio 2017 compatibility and Visual Studio 2017 system requirements. Also, be sure to read this article to learn about offline installations.

As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Report a Problem option in the upper right corner, either from the installer or the Visual Studio IDE itself. Track your feedback on the developer community portal. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio @JohnMont John is responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, and .NET. John has been at Microsoft for 17 years, working in developer technologies the whole time.

Today at the Microsoft Build conference, we announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2017 for Mac.

Visual Studio for Mac is a full-featured IDE built natively for the Mac, to help you develop, debug, and test anything from mobile and web apps to games. Teams across PC and Mac can share code seamlessly by relying on the same solutions and projects. This is all offered in an IDE that is natively designed for the Mac and feels right at home for any Mac user.

Workloads for mobile, web, cloud and gaming

Mobile Development with C# and .NET

Visual Studio for Mac provides an amazing experience for creating mobile apps using Xamarin, from integrated designers to the code editing experience to the packaging and publishing tools. It is complemented by:

• The full power of the beloved-by-millions C# 7 programming language
• Complete .NET APIs covering 100% of the APIs for Android, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS development
• The Xamarin.Forms API abstraction to maximize code sharing
• Access to thousands of .NET libraries on NuGet.org to accelerate your mobile development
• Highly optimized native code backed by the LLVM optimizing compiler

Web development with ASP.NET Core and Azure

Since we released the first Visual Studio for Mac preview last November, we’ve been working hard on porting over the web editor tools from Visual Studio on Windows. Now with this release, you have full support to build out rich web-based applications using ASP.NET Core and front-end languages like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.

And when your web app is perfectly polished and ready for release, you can directly publish to Azure using the new Publish to Azure wizard, without having to leave the IDE.

Building Games using Unity

Newly announced at Build, Visual Studio for Mac now helps you create games using C#, .NET, and Unity.

When paired with Unity 5.6.1 you have full support to build and debug games from within the IDE, including support for:

• Project support, to easily browse and find your scripts
• Code completion for methods invoked from the game engine
• One click debugging support to attach to the Unity editor

Work seamlessly between the Mac and PC

Visual Studio for Mac helps you collaborate with others in your team, regardless of if they’re using a Mac or PC. Solutions and projects work in both Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio, making it easy for heterogenous development teams to collaborate on the same projects, across operating systems. This also means that you can easily “round-trip” between machines, without losing any efficiency.

Built for the Mac

Visual Studio for Mac is a new IDE experience built specifically for the Mac, not a direct port of Visual Studio on Windows. This means that the UI is built to feel like you would expect working with a macOS targeted application, from primitive elements like buttons and text to the layout of the application and icons. We’ve also optimized the developer workflow to what developers on a Mac expect, making it feel right at home, without a steep learning curve to adopt.

A preview of what’s coming up next

With this release, we’re just getting started, so today we also talked about some great new preview features, which we’ll make available in our alpha channel really soon. These are preview features that are not present on the stable release, but ready for you to try once released and give us feedback:

• Docker support: supporting deploying and debugging of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core in Docker containers.
• Azure Functions support: use this preview to develop, debug and deploy Azure Functions from your Mac.
• Target IoT devices: target IoT devices like Android Things with your C# code and Xamarin.

To try out these preview features, you can subscribe to the Alpha channel in Visual Studio for Mac.

Enjoy! And let us know what you think

If you already have Visual Studio for Mac Preview installed, make sure you update to the latest version from within the app. If you haven’t tried out a preview yet, head on over to VisualStudio.com to download the latest release. To learn more about what’s in this release, check out the release notes.

Note: For everyone who downloads Visual Studio for Mac before May 17^th, we’re offering an extended 60-day trial of Xamarin University, free of charge. This includes live instructor-led classes and great content to get you started using Visual Studio for Mac.

We’re very proud of this release and we want to hear what you think – please, send us your feedback! You can use Visual Studio for Mac’s “Report a Problem” or “Provide a Suggestion” dialog (within the Help menu) to provide feedback. Or join the conversation in the Visual Studio for Mac community forums.

Enjoy!

Miguel.

Miguel de Icaza, Distinguished Engineer, Mobile Developer Tools @migueldeicaza Miguel is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, focused on the mobile platform and creating delightful developer tools. With Nat Friedman, he co-founded both Xamarin in 2011 and Ximian in 1999. Before that, Miguel co-founded the GNOME project in 1997 and has directed the Mono project since its creation in 2001, including multiple Mono releases at Novell. Miguel has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Free Software Award, the MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year Award in 1999, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 innovators for the new century in September 2000.

In Visual Studio, you can now easily configure your projects to access data across Office 365 and Azure Active Directory through the Microsoft Graph.

Microsoft Graph serves as the single gateway for developers to access APIs for Exchange, SharePoint, Azure AD, OneNote, Planner, Excel, and more. It provides one REST API endpoint across all of Microsoft’s APIs, and includes access to insights and relationship analysis powered by its intelligent engine. This means that you no longer have to integrate individual Microsoft services separately into your apps, enabling you to leverage many different services easily and efficiently.

So, if you want to build an app that can, for example, rate the importance of meetings on your calendar based on how relevant the attendees are to you, Visual Studio can help you get up and running fast, without leaving the IDE.

All you need is to install the latest Visual Studio 2017 Preview. Now let’s take a look at what’s new in Visual Studio 2017 Preview for Microsoft Graph.

Access from the Solution Explorer

Those of you who have previously used the Connected Services dialog to access the old Office 365 individual service endpoints will be familiar with the flow. When you open or create a project in Visual Studio, you will see Connected Services in the Solution Explorer. Clicking on it will take you to the Connected Services tab, in which you will see the “Access Office 365 Services with Microsoft Graph” provider.

The provider will guide you through a wizard to complete the configuration and get started with your new Microsoft Graph application—without ever leaving the IDE! You will be able to use the Graph provider with any of the projects for Universal Windows Platform, ASP.NET and Web, Windows Store, Windows Phone, WPF, Android, and iOS.

Easily configure your app in Azure Active Directory

The “Access Office 365 Services with Microsoft Graph” provider enables you to sign into your Office 365 developer domain account and register your application in Azure Active Directory to access Microsoft Graph APIs. You can either create a new app in Azure AD, or use an existing one for your project.

The Visual Studio experience uses the Azure AD endpoint for authenticating Microsoft Graph apps, and you can manage the apps you create and register from Visual Studio in your Azure Management Portal. If you want to enable authentication against the Azure AD v2.0 endpoint for Microsoft Graph apps, please see the documentation on the topic here.

Try new Office 365 services

You can set permissions in the wizard for the following resource types: Calendars, Contacts, Mail, Files, Sites, User, Group, Directory, Notes, Tasks, and People.

Notes, Tasks, and People APIs are new additions to Microsoft Graph’s list of available services. The Notes API provides access to OneNote notebooks, the Tasks API to Planner tasks, and the People API to aggregated context about a person from across mail, contacts, and social networks, based on the person’s collaboration and business relationships. Please note that the People API is still in preview.

Acquire required dependencies immediately

Once you choose the permissions for your Graph app, Visual Studio will automatically acquire all required dependencies to use Microsoft Graph and add them to your project, one of them being the Microsoft Graph SDK. You will be able to see what was added under the “Connected Services” tab in your project’s Solution Explorer. Visual Studio will also point you to documentation in a web browser on how to get started developing a simple Graph app.

Send us Feedback!

Microsoft Graph continues to grow its list of available services that can power your intelligent apps connected to the Microsoft cloud. And as always, Visual Studio wants to provide the best experience to get you started.

We would love to hear any feedback you have on the new experience for Microsoft Graph in Visual Studio. Please use Visual Studio’s “Report a Problem” or “Provide a Suggestion” features in the upper right corner of the IDE to send bugs or suggestions. You can then track responses to your feedback on the developer community portal.

Thank You!

Ji Eun Kwon, Program Manager, Office Developer Tools @Ji_Eun__Kwon Ji Eun Kwon is the program manager for Developer Tools for Office and SharePoint. She joined Microsoft in 2013 and has since been focusing on developer experiences inside Visual Studio. Prior to owning the Office Developer Tools, she worked on Visual Studio’s identity and licensing experiences

Today at Microsoft Build 2017, we’re excited to announce a set of new benefits for Visual Studio Subscribers and Dev Essentials program members.

If you’re a current Visual Studio subscriber or Dev Essentials program member activate your new benefits to get started right away. To learn more about our developer subscriptions and programs visit the Visual Studio site. Here are the details:

Visual Studio for Mac

Visual Studio for Mac is an IDE for developers on macOS looking to design, build, deploy, and manage modern applications, games, and services targeting Android, iOS, macOS, web, and the cloud. Visual Studio subscribers and Visual Studio Dev Essentials members now have access to an edition of Visual Studio for Mac that corresponds to their subscription level,, at no additional cost. The Community edition is free to use for non-enterprise developers, within Dev Essentials program. The Professional and Enterprise editions are available in the Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Enterprise subscriptions respectively. Both Visual Studio Cloud Subscriptions Annual and Monthly, will also have access to the corresponding IDE edition.

Learn more about Visual Studio for Mac here

Opsgility on-demand training

Opsgility is a Microsoft Silver Learning Partner that delivers training focused on cloud technologies like Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365 , built around a network of industry experts and technical authors that includes Microsoft MVPs and Insiders in more than 10 countries. They help developers build cloud skills through deep-dive training and hands-on labs, learning paths to Microsoft Cloud certifications, and architecture planning sessions.

Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers now get a one-year membership plan to Opsgility, unlocking access to their complete catalog of on-demand videos, hands-on labs, and more. Additionally, Visual Studio Enterprise members receive up to four hours of cloud readiness planning with a Senior Cloud Solution Architect, and a team subscription with up to five licenses.

Visual Studio Professional, Visual Studio MSDN Platforms, and Visual Studio Test Pro subscribers now get a six-month membership plan to Opsgility unlocking access to their full catalog of on-demand videos, hands-on labs, and more.

Visual Studio Dev Essentials members — as you may remember from the Visual Studio 2017 launch in March – Dev Essentials members receive access to a free three-month membership to Opsgility’s on-demand training videos. . Beginning today, Dev Essentials members now also have access to hands-on labs!

Finally, Visual Studio Subscribers and Dev Essentials members also receive a range of special discounts on Opsgility’s instructor-led training offerings. For more information, see Opsgility’s blog.

Log into the Visual Studio Subscriptions portal today to get your new benefits.

We hope you enjoy these new benefits. Please feel free to share your feedback, suggestions, thoughts, and ideas in the comments below!

Shawn Nandi, Senior Director- Developer Programs, Partnerships and Planning – Cloud App Dev and Data Product Marketing @ShawnNandi Shawn drives partnerships and business planning for the developer business at Microsoft as well as product marketing for developer programs and subscriptions including Visual Studio Subscriptions and Dev Essentials.

I’m excited to announce that the Data Science and analytics applications workload is available today in Visual Studio 2017. It had made a brief appearance in preview releases of Visual Studio, but had to be delayed while we completed localization and accessibility work. But now it’s once again ready for you.

The Data Science (or DS) workload brings three languages and their respective runtime distributions to Visual Studio as a single workload:

• R and Microsoft R Client
• Python and Anaconda
• F# with the .NET framework

Today R and Python are two of the primary scripting languages used for data science. They are both easy to learn and are supported by a rich ecosystem of packages that address just about every scenario from data acquisition, cleaning, model training, and deployment for a wide range of domains. And F# is a powerful functional-first .NET language that’s suited for a wide variety of data processing tasks:

F#, R Tools, and Python Tools in Visual Studio 2017

Python in SQL Server

Last year we announced support for R inside SQL. We’re delighted to add Python to the list! When you install SQL Server 2017 CTP 2.0, you can select Python and a subset of Anaconda packages (for example, numpy, scipy, pandas, and more) for doing advanced analytics directly in SQL server, where your data already resides:

Call Python from T-SQL directly

Python support is available today for SQL Server in Windows; and stay tuned for Linux support!

R Tools support for SQL

R Tools for Visual Studio makes working with SQL much more productive, including adding a database connection string to your project and developing, testing and publishing SQL Stored Procedures:

Create SQL projects and Stored Procedures directly in Visual Studio / R

Check out this short Video that goes over the R Tools/SQL integration, as well as Working with SQL Server and R in the R Tools documentation (which is now on docs.microsoft.com!).

F#, R, and Python support in Jupyter notebook service

We also provide a Free Jupyter notebook service with support for our DS workload languages. Think of Notebooks as a REPL on steroids: code, markdown, inline graphics and more. Simply hop over to https://notebooks.azure.com and click on one of the front page samples to get started:

Python, R and F# Notebooks complement the Data Science workload

If you want to give Notebooks a try, click the Intro to Python or the Intro to F# sample on the front page.

Visual Studio supports importing, running/debugging exported Jupyter .py files: simply open the file and use Ctrl-enter to advance through code cells one by one.

Conclusion

R, Python, F#, and their ecosystem of packages cover a wide spectrum of Data Science scenarios. The Data Science workload in Visual Studio 2017 provides all the building blocks you need to build intelligent apps immediately: from data acquisition, data wrangling, and building models, to visualization and deployment. Additionally, the integration of Python and R in SQL Server enable rich extensibility as well as avoiding unnecessary data movement by taking your code to the data. So take the workload for a spin and let us know what you think!

Twitter: @pt4vs, @rt4vs, @azurenotebooks

Code, bugs, feature requests on Github: github.com/{ptvs, rtvs, azurenotebooks}

Shahrokh Mortazavi, Partner PM, Data Science Tools Shahrokh Mortazavi runs the Data Science Developer Tools teams at Microsoft, focused on Python, R, and Jupyter Notebooks. Previously, he was in the High Performance Computing group at Microsoft. He worked on the Phoenix Compiler tool chain (code gen, analysis, JIT) at Microsoft Research and, prior to that, over a 10 year period led Sun Microsystems’ Code Generation & Optimization compiler backend teams.

In 2014, we released the first version of the Visual Studio Tools for Unity (VSTU). Since then, we’ve successfully released multiple versions of the Tools for Unity on Windows, but never had the opportunity to bring our tools to Unity developers running macOS.

Today at the Microsoft Build conference, we announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2017 for Mac. This is a full-featured IDE built for the Mac, to help you create anything from mobile and web apps to games.

We’re excited to include the Tools for Unity in this release, and give the opportunity to Unity developers on macOS to use Visual Studio for Mac.

Setup

You’ll need at least Unity 5.6.1, the first version of Unity to support Visual Studio for Mac and the Tools for Unity. Getting started could not be easier: In Unity, simply set Visual Studio for Mac to be the external script editor.

Opening any C# script from Unity will now launch Visual Studio for Mac.

Features Highlights

One click debugging

Simply click the start button in Visual Studio for Mac to attach the debugger to the Unity Editor. Even faster, press ⌘ Command + Enter.

You can put breakpoints and step through your scripts. You can browse the local variables, analyze the call stack, and evaluate expressions.

Unity solution pad

Visual Studio for Mac will display the solution the same way it is displayed in Unity, making it much easier to navigate and find your scripts. You can see it in the screenshot above.

IntelliSense for Unity messages.

Unity messages are methods that are called by the Unity game engine. Previously you needed to learn their signature, now Visual Studio for Mac provides code completion for them when writing scripts for Unity.

Miscellaneous

Visual Studio for Mac also provides:

• Code coloration for shaders. Visual Studio for Mac supports syntax highlighting for ShaderLab, Unity’s shader format.
• Access to the Unity documentation by searching types and members in Unity’s documentation from the IDE. Simply select the text you want to search and press ⌘ Command + ‘ to read their documentation.

Wrapping up

If you already have Visual Studio for Mac Preview installed, make sure you update to the latest version from within the app, otherwise head on over to VisualStudio.com to download the latest release and checkout the release notes.

We want to hear what you think – please, send us your feedback! You can use Visual Studio for Mac’s “Report a Problem” or “Provide a Suggestion” dialog (within the Help menu) to provide feedback. Or join the conversation in the Visual Studio for Mac community forums.

Jb Evain, Principal Software Engineer Manager @jbevain Jb runs the Visual Studio Tools for Unity experience He has a passion for developer tools and programming languages, and has been working in developer technologies for over a decade.

Last fall we introduced Visual Studio Mobile Center (Preview), a cloud service designed to help developers manage the lifecycle of their mobile apps and ship higher-quality apps faster than ever. Today we announced several exciting improvements that expand the features of the service and extend Mobile Center to new audiences and platforms.

What’s New

Windows Support

From the beginning, we designed Mobile Center to help all application developers build and ship higher quality apps faster. We want every developer on every platform to be first-class citizens. At Microsoft Build 2017 this morning, we’ve added support for Windows apps alongside iOS and Android. Starting today, Universal Windows Platform (UWP) developers have access to Mobile Center’s Build, Distribute, Analytics, and brand new Push services. The Crashes and Test service will become available later this year.

A New Push Service

A great CI/CD pipeline is critical to delivering software quickly and with confidence. The Mobile Center Build, Test, and Distribute services are designed to make this a part of every developer’s workflow. Our Crash reporting and Analytics services ensure that you can learn about each release’s quality and usage, but a common request we’ve heard from developers is the ability to send Push messages using Mobile Center Analytics data to help ensure that the right end-user is receiving timely notifications. This tightens the loop from check-in all the way through deep engagement with end-users.

With our new Push service, Mobile Center developers can send targeted messages to specific sets of users at exactly the right time. Customers can create segments based on over a dozen different properties, including carrier, language, device model, screen size, and time zone, with many more to come. If you want to try out the new Push service, please contact us via our in-app support.

VSTS and Bitbucket Integration

We’re huge fans of GitHub, so it became our first choice when we launched the Mobile Center Build service last November. We also believe in flexibility and choice, though, so today we’re proud to announce support for git repositories from Visual Studio Team Services and Bitbucket. All repositories and services offer the same features, including our powerful build-on-push feature and our new launch test.

New Test Frameworks: XCUITest and Espresso

Several Preview customers told us they loved our Test service, but they wanted to write their tests in a more familiar, platform-specific framework. We listened, and we now support XCUITest and Espresso, the native test frameworks for iOS and Android. Now developers can write their automated UI tests in their preferred languages and port existing tests to Mobile Center Test.

Deploy to Store

Mobile Center has offered a powerful beta tester distribution service since our first preview, with successful builds automatically sent to testers with ease. Developers have told us they’d love this same mechanism to let them deploy the applications to app stores and company portals.

With our new enhancements to the Distribute service, once a developer is confident about their apps quality, they can promote the latest build directly to an app store or company portal. Today you can do this with Google Play, and very soon we’ll be adding connectors for Intune, the App Store, and the Windows Store.

HockeyApp and Mobile Center

Mobile Center is the next generation of HockeyApp. Starting today, we’re launching the first step in our transition plan for HockeyApp users: use existing apps from HockeyApp inside Mobile Center, analyze crash reports and analytics, and connect to the Build, Test, and Push services.

Apps, organizations, collaborators, and testers now co-exist in HockeyApp and Mobile Center, so developers can use Mobile Center’s new services on active HockeyApp apps without affecting the HockeyApp experience. Changes made in HockeyApp will update Mobile Center to ensure consistency, and incoming app data from the HockeySDK will be streamed to Mobile Center.

We’re rolling this feature out to HockeyApp users over time and developers will get an email when we’re ready to extend this to their apps.

What’s Next?

New mobile platforms, testing frameworks, push services, and repo support are just the beginning—we have a lot more coming soon. Deployments to consumer app stores and secure private portals will be coming in the next few months, as will increased support for UWP, parity with our HockeyApp and Test Cloud services, and entirely new cloud development services. Sign up now to get started!

Keith Ballinger, Director of Program Management for Mobile Developer Cloud Services @KeithBa Keith was previously the VP of Product for Xamarin, which Microsoft acquired in March of 2016. Keith has a strong background in entrepreneurship, engineering, and product management, dating back to his time as a PM on the original .NET team. In 2007, Keith left Microsoft for the startup world, co-founding several mobile-first startups. In 2012, he led the team that created SmartPay, a mobile payment application that processes over $1 billion each year. Previous to Xamarin, Keith was the Chief Architect at the YC-backed startup Standard Treasury, building an API-first bank. He’s the author of two books on programming, “.NET Web Service: Architecture and Implementation” and co-author of “Special Edition: Using ASP.”

We released the Xamarin SDKs as a part of Visual Studio a year ago, open sourcing them in the process. Since then, we’ve been busy improving the experience of mobile developers using Visual Studio, launching iOS simulator remoting, Workbooks, Inspector, the Xamarin.Forms Previewer, and support for iOS 10 and Android N.

In the last year, we’ve also created two new products—Visual Studio for Mac, which Scott Guthrie announced as generally available to all Visual Studio customers yesterday, and Visual Studio Mobile Center (Preview), for which we’re releasing major new updates today.

Today we’ve also released the preview of Xamarin Live Player, a live coding environment to make development and debugging faster.

The IDE loved by millions, now on the Mac: Visual Studio for Mac

Since we released the first Visual Studio for Mac preview six months ago, we’ve been working hard to create a new IDE experience that feels right at home on macOS. Visual Studio for Mac is a full-featured IDE to help you build anything, from mobile and web apps to games.

Whether you use C#, F#, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Xamarin, or Unity, you’ll get an amazing experience to create apps, from integrated designers to the packaging and publishing tools. You can publish web apps directly to Azure using the new Publish to Azure wizard, without having to leave the IDE. Solutions and projects work in both Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio, making it easy for you to collaborate with anyone on your team on the same projects, across operating systems.

To learn more about what’s new, including preview support for Docker and Azure Functions, read this post by Miguel on the Visual Studio blog. Head over to VisualStudio.com to download Visual Studio for Mac today.

Develop and debug Android and iOS apps instantly: Xamarin Live Player Preview

Xamarin Live Player enables any developer to get started with Android and iOS development in minutes, with nothing more than just a physical iOS or Android device and Visual Studio. There’s no need to install gigabytes of SDKs and emulators to get started; just download an app and you are ready to go.

Simply pair your device with Visual Studio by scanning a QR code, and hit debug like you normally would. The application is deployed in seconds to the Live Player app, enabling you to quickly develop and test your changes without having to recompile and redeploy your application. And you can set break points and debug your application, on device and over the air.

Live Run is the the second benefit. When you are working on a single screen, view, or segment of code, enter Live Run Current View mode by selecting it from the menu.  Then, simply modify your C# or XAML, and the current view is redeployed as you develop.

The Live Player extensions for both Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac are available today, and the Xamarin Live Player apps can be found in both Google Play and iOS App Store.

For more details, read Miguel’s post on the Xamarin blog.

Build high quality apps, faster with Visual Studio Mobile Center

Last November, we introduced Visual Studio Mobile Center Preview, a set of cloud services for building and managing your mobile apps. Mobile Center is designed for apps targeting iOS and Android, including apps written in Swift, Objective-C, Java, Xamarin, and React Native. It is the next generation of Xamarin Insights, Xamarin Test Cloud, and HockeyApp. Today, we announced several new features for Mobile Center:

• Windows support: You can now automate builds and distribution, collect user analytics, and deliver push notifications to your UWP users. We’ll have a preview of the Crashes and Test services for UWP applications later this year.

• You can now use the Build service with your repository from Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Bitbucket, and GitHub. It’s never been easier to set up Continuous Integration and Delivery for your app.
• In addition to Appium and Xamarin.UITest, Mobile Center now supports the platform-specific test frameworks for iOS and Android – XCUITest and Espresso – enabling you to write test scripts in your preferred framework.
• With the Distribute service, you can promote your successful builds directly to the app stores or your Intune company portal.
• The new Mobile Center Push service allows you to segment and target users based on analytics data, like geography, network provider, or activity.

Read Keith Ballinger’s post for more details about new services and improvements.

A home run with customers

The Minnesota Twins are early adopters of our latest mobile tools, including Visual Studio for Mac and Mobile Center. They’re recently released an app for scouts to track players and stats. The Twins’ development team is just getting started, with many new features on the roadmap.

According to John Avenson, Vice President, Technology at Minnesota Twins, “Our productivity is key to concentrating on delivering value to the business. Our developers are more efficient because they work in their favorite environments, whether on the PC or Mac. Automated builds and distribution to beta testers and internal stakeholders cuts down our feedback loop, so we can get apps out to users more quickly. With Microsoft’s mobile technology, we support our users today and continuously release new game-changing features.”

We’ve done a lot in the last year, but we’re just getting started. Developers are at the center of everything we do, and we’ll continue to develop and release new tools, technology, and services to help you deliver the best, cloud-connected apps for any platform.

Get started with Visual Studio for Mac, available for download immediately.

Sign up for Visual Studio Mobile Center to start building better apps, faster.

Nat Friedman, Corporate Vice President, Mobile Developer Tools Nat is CVP for the Mobile Developer Tools team at Microsoft. He co-founded Xamarin, Inc. with Miguel de Icaza in 2011 and served as CEO through acquisition by Microsoft in 2016. Earlier in his career, Nat served as CTO for the Linux business at Novell, co-founded Ximian with Miguel in 1999, and co-founded and served as chairman of the GNOME foundation in 1997. He is passionate about building products that delight developers. Nat has two degrees from MIT and has been writing software for 27 years. He is an avid traveler, active angel investor, and a private pilot.

We’re delighted to announce that our rich Python toolchain is fully available in Visual Studio 2017. Installation of Python tools, interpreters, runtimes, and numerous other features are directly integrated into the Visual Studio 2017 installer. Just select the Python development or Data science and analytical applications workloads, both of which let you select specific interpreters like Anaconda and also provide a variety of productivity features:

• Cookiecutter template support, so you can create projects from dozens of templates hosted on GitHub with a few clicks.
• Azure cloud service tools, including template to augment existing apps and create new ones that use the latest Azure services ranging from SQL Databases to Data Lake.
• Python native development tools to write high-performance C++ extensions for Python.
• Support for code cells and a Jupyter Notebook-like Ctrl+Enter cell execution experience.

In addition, for the first time we’ve localized Python tools into the same 14 languages as Visual Studio, making for a seamless experience across the entire IDE.

All the tools in one place

Let’s take a deeper look into the Python development workload in Visual Studio 2017. (For more on the Data science and analytical applications workload, see Shahrokh Mortazavi’s post, Build Intelligent Apps Faster with Visual Studio. You can also find full documentation for the Python tools at Working with Python in Visual Studio.)

When you select the Python development workload in the Visual Studio installer, either with a new install or modifying your existing installation, you of course get core Python language support including IntelliSense, projects, local and remote debugging, profiling, unit testing, and an integrated REPL environment. Then you can easily select a variety of options as shown on the right side of the installer, including interpreters and specific toolsets. Let’s take a quick look at these.

Python web support

Do you work on Django, Flask, or Bottle apps in Python? Or perhaps another framework? By adding Python web support, you get templates for these languages and the Visual Studio HTML editor with JavaScript (and TypeScript) support. You will also be able to easily publish web sites to Azure through the integrated tools.

Python native development tools

The Python native development tools component includes everything you need to build C++ extension modules, or even build CPython from source. You will get C++ project support and templates, mixed-mode debugging, as well as the latest compiler and the Visual C++ compiler required for compatibility with Python 3.5 and later. You can experience all this for yourself with our Creating a C++ Extension for Python walkthrough.

Python IoT support

The Python IoT support option includes tools needed for writing apps in Python for Windows IoT Core. Note that you’ll also need to download the Python UWP SDK, which is not available through the Visual Studio installer.

Python and Anaconda distributions

Although you can edit Python code quite comfortably without an interpreter, you always need to install a Python interpreter to run it. Previously, this was something you had to do separately from installing the Python tools in Visual Studio, but not for Visual Studio 2017 you can select from a variety of interpreters right in the installer. For example, if you’re just getting started you can just use the Python 3.6 default. Alternately, if you know that you want to use Python 2.7, or want the scientific tools in an Anaconda distribution, those options are readily available as well. And if you already have Python installed, you can easily point Visual Studio to use that environment as well.

Cookiecutter Template Support

Cookiecutter is a popular Open Source templating engine that lets experts easily create highly customizable templates to help other users get started on a project with customized boilerplate code. With Cookicutter integrated directly into Visual Studio, you can more quickly stand up apps, prototype experiences that integrate different services, and try out new frameworks.

You can search, install, and generate projects from Cookiecutter templates within Visual Studio using the Cookiecutter Explorer tool. The community has created several web app templates for Django and Flask, and recently we have seen an increasing number of templates for data science and machine learning.

Recommended templates make it easy for you to discover Azure templates. We have worked several Azure teams to provide rich templates spanning scenarios ranging from High Performance Computing (HPC) using Azure Batch and Data Lake Store to Internet of Things (IoT) with Azure IoT Hub to web development with Azure Web App. The tool also checks if updates are available for an installed templates and prompt accordingly.

Template description and links to issues, and documentations are surfaced up front to help you navigate to the relevant material on Github faster. All searches are live, so you are getting the latest template information and code from Github.

A form UI makes is simple to add context like database connection strings, subscription ID, and provide various config settings and preferences. The result is a project that’s tailored to your context so you can get started on the business logic faster. Check out our detailed post for more details. Template developers can also provide helpful descriptors for each of their context variables in the cookiecutter.json file. These descriptions are shown as tooltips in Visual Studio tool.

Working with Jupyter Notebooks

Many developers spend much of their time in the Python REPL experience, and Python in Visual Studio 2017 makes it even more powerful with the ability to debug and profile Jupyter notebooks directly in the Visual Studio IDE.

To work with a notebook, simply download your IPYNB file as a .py file and open it in Visual Studio. You’ll see that markdown cells have been turned into comments and each cell is collapsible and expandable. To run a cell, click anywhere in the cell and press Ctrl+Enter, just like you do in notebooks, which runs the cell in the the Python interactive window.

You can add code cells by marking them with #%% and create as many interactive windows as you like, with a different Python environment for each one. If you have the Anaconda distribution installed, and you have been working on an online notebook service like Azure Notebooks, you may be able to run your code without installing any additional package by simply selecting Anaconda as your REPL environment.

Localization

For the first time, Python support for Visual Studio is available in all 14 languages that Visual Studio itself supports.

Choose the language packs you wish to install using the Visual Studio installer, and switch to your language of choice across the entire IDE, including the Python tools, by using Tools > Options > Environment > International Settings in Visual Studio.

Looking Ahead

With localization of the Python tools complete, we’ll now be focusing on making our tools accessible over the next few months with better keyword navigation, high contrast support, and narrator friendliness. Some of these improvements have already made their way into the current release. We’re also improving Azure App Service deployment and designing features for data scientists who might desire more overlap between Python and R tools. We’d also love to hear what features are important to you! Let us know by filling or upvoting a Github issue. For more frequent updates on our future progress, check out the Microsoft Python Engineering blog.

Usman Anwer, Program Manager II, Data Science Tools @uanwer Usman works on Python and R Tools for Visual Studio and the Azure Python SDK. Previously, he was on the Developer Ecosystem and Platform team in Windows and Devices Group, where he worked on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), UWP on Xbox, Windows 10 Bridge for Desktop Apps, and putting open source software in Windows.

Last week at //BUILD, the Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio shipped a new update. As always we are continuing to expand the extension’s set of features guided by your feedback. The enthusiasm and feedback has validated just how much opportunity there is to help you continuously deliver value to your users. Apart from bug fixes, our latest update includes support for configuring a continuous delivery pipeline for solutions with Docker Compose to Azure App Service on Linux and Azure Service Fabric Cluster. We also introduced a new feature to help you improve your code quality. On code commit, we now remind you of any code analysis issues that have not been addressed yet. Clicking on the error indicator will take you to the error list. This means you can take care of those issues before they propagate into your team’s CI/CD process, and commit with confidence. Click here for another blog with more details about that feature.

Configuring Continuous Delivery to App Service on Linux

As we continue to expand support for container enabled solutions, you can now configure build and release definitions directly from within the IDE. With support for ASP.NET core and containers, Azure App Service on Linux is a solid viable environment for developers to get started with containers.

To configure continuous delivery to App Service on Linux, create or open an existing solution with an ASP.NET Core project. Add Docker support to the project and ensure that the solution is under version control on VSTS or GitHub. Right click on the solution in Solution Explorer and select Configure Continuous Delivery.

Then, select App Service (Linux) as the Target Host type and an Azure App Service to act as a target for continuous delivery.

To ensure a successful CI build, update the .dockerignore file in the ASP.NET Core project to remove the “*” entry. You also need to update the docker file in the ASP.NET project to copy the required assets to the publish folder and update the correct entry point for the application assembly:

Configuring Continuous Delivery to Service Fabric Cluster

Apart from App Service on Linux, you can also configure continuous delivery to Service Fabric Clusters. To configure continuous delivery to a service fabric cluster, first you need to create one on Azure. If you configured an existing Service Fabric Cluster on Azure, make sure that you install the cluster certificate on your development machine with the exportable key option checked.

When configuring continuous delivery to Service Fabric you will need to enter the password for the cluster certificate and select an existing Azure Container registry. The release task uses the cluster certificate and password to connect to the cluster while deploying to it.

Configuring Continuous Delivery to Azure Container Services

We recently, removed support for Azure Container Services from the extension. We are redesigning our support for Azure Container services and will update the extension soon to include support for Kubernetes Containers.

Please keep the feedback coming!

Thank you to everyone who has reached out and shared feedback and ideas so far. We’re always looking for feedback on where to take this Microsoft DevLabs extension next. There’s a Slack channel and a team alias vsdevops@microsoft.com where you can reach out to the team and others in the community sharing ideas on this topic.

Ahmed Metwally, Senior PM, Visual Studio @cd4vs (https://twitter.com/cd4vs) Ahmed is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Platform team focused on improving team collaboration and application lifecycle management integration.

Many developers tell us that they are under pressure to deliver software on an ever-faster cadence. This pressure for increased speed makes building your software at high quality from the start even more important – you want to make sure that any commits you make to your codebase are at the right quality, to avoid costly remediation of errors later. Getting key information about your code’s quality at key moments such as commits and pull requests can help you meet quality goals without distracting you from creating the features your customers demand. We’re now providing that information at commit time in the latest release of the Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio extension.

Get a heads-up on Build and Code Analysis Results on Commit

With the new Build and Code Analysis Results panel, you’ll get a heads-up reminder at commit-time of issues detected by any code analysis tool that puts results in the error list. This means you can take care of those issues before they propagate into your team’s continuous integration and delivery process, and commit your code with confidence.

Just click the View Issues link in the new panel, and you’ll be taken straight to the Error List tool window showing the problems you’ve configured to show up there, and may want to take a look at:

You’ll see results both for live edit-time analysis (e.g. C#/VB Analyzers) and, via the Refresh Analysis link, for compile-time static analysis (e.g. C++ Static Analysis tools). Many C#/VB Analyzers also provide Lightbulb fix suggestions to make the job of remediation easier.

See issues from multiple analysis sources

The Build and Code Analysis Results panel uses the issues posted to the error list, which means that your heads-up can include data from multiple sources. For instance, if you are a SonarQube user, you can easily set up SonarLint (see more details in Jean-Marc Prieur’s article) and see results in the error list, gaining the benefit of the new heads-up panel as well, as shown in the screenshot above.

Other providers of analysis tools are already working on providing error list support for their results. For instance I recently demonstrated a prototype of NDepend at Build 2017 (See video ), see the screenshot below:

If you want to narrow your focus to just the files that are included in your commit, you can easily achieve this by selecting the Changed Documents option from the Error List drop down which shows up when your code is under source code control:

For instance, this can be useful if your team has a policy of “fix it if you touch the file”. The panel is supported on Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise. It currently supports C#, VB and C++ projects, where the code is being committed to a Git Repo.

Please Share Your Feedback

Please download and try the Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio DevLabs extension, try out the new Build and Code Analysis Results panel and let us know what you think.

Tell us more about what you think about this by filling out a short survey

We’re always looking for feedback on where to take this Microsoft DevLabs extension next; features from the extension have already been refined using that feedback and incorporated into the core Visual Studio product in updates. There’s a Slack channel and a team alias vsdevops@microsoft.com where you can reach out to the team and others in the community sharing ideas on this topic.

Mark Wilson-Thomas, Senior Program Manager, Visual Studio IDE Team @MarkPavWT Mark is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio IDE team, where he’s been building developer tools for nearly 10 years. He currently looks after the Visual Studio Editor. Prior to that, he worked on tools for Office, SQL, WPF and Silverlight.