Visual Studio for Mac has support for the latest C# 8 IntelliSense and code refactoring capabilities across C#, HTML, JS, CSS and Razor files. Along with NuGet package management, source control, debugging and publishing features, Visual Studio for Mac provides the best experience for building .NET Core and ASP.NET Core apps on the Mac.

Getting started with ASP.NET Core in Visual Studio for Mac

If you’re just getting started with ASP.NET Core and Visual Studio for Mac, take your first steps with the Getting started with ASP.NET Core in Visual Studio for Mac tutorial. This tutorial will first walk you through installing Visual Studio for Mac with a one-click setting that will include all tools required for .NET Core and ASP.NET Core development before showing you how to create your first “Hello world!” ASP.NET Core website.

ASP.NET Core Beginners Workshop

In this step-by-step ASP.NET Core Beginners workshop, you will learn the basics of building a simple ASP.NET Core web app that uses Razor pages. This tutorial consists of the following four modules and includes creating the project, adding an Entity Framework model, working with a database and much more:

1. Creating a Razor Page project
2. Adding a model to an ASP.NET Core Razor Pages app
3. Updating the generated pages
4. Adding search to a Razor Pages app

eShopOnWeb tutorial

If you’re already familiar with ASP.NET Core and are looking for a more realistic sample application, we have you covered with the eShopOnWeb sample application. eShopOnWeb is a sample application demonstrating a layered application architecture with a monolithic deployment model. Head over to extending an existing ASP.NET Core web application for the video tutorials and step-by-step guides for Visual Studio for Mac. This tutorial consists of the following modules:

1. Getting started with eShopOnWeb
2. Working with the eShopOnWeb solution
3. Adding Docker and running it locally
4. Deploying to Azure App Services

And if you don’t have an Azure account to work on this tutorial, you can get one totally free here! This also comes with over $200 free Azure credits to spend as you see fit.

Additionally, there is also a fantastic 130 page PDF ebook available which goes over all the details of this full sample application that you can download from GitHub.

Thanks for trying out these tutorials and Visual Studio for Mac. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please leave them in the comments below. You can also reach out to us on Twitter at @VisualStudioMac. For any issues that you run into when using Visual Studio for Mac, please Report a Problem.

The post New learning resources for building ASP.NET Core apps using Visual Studio for Mac appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

Welcome to the October update of Azure IoT Tools!

In this October release, you will see the totally new experience of sending device-to-cloud messages and Azure IoT Device Provisioning Service support in Visual Studio Code.

New experience of sending device-to-cloud messages

Z, a software engineer, developed an application about a smart home assistant using Azure IoT service, and he wonders if the application works fine. He wants to send messages indicating time and temperature to IoT Hub from many devices simultaneously each for many iterations. In this case, these messages should be formed in a similar template but the data should be randomly generated for each message. In addition, he wants to send these messages repeatedly, each with a fixed interval, like one second, as is done by true temperature sensors.

This is a very common scenario in IoT development, frustrating a lot of programmers. Here is the good news for Z, and for all of you: You can get rid of all these trivial things with the help of our new feature!

We improved the function in Azure IoT Hub Toolkit (part of the Azure IoT Tools extension pack now) to help you quickly send D2C messages. You only need to specify the device(s), the number of iteration(s), the delivery interval, and the data template. And then we will randomly generate data in your specified format for you and send it out.

For more details, you can check out this blog post to see how to use this feature with the step-by-step instructions.

Support Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service in Visual Studio Code

The Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service is a helper service for Azure IoT Hub that enables zero-touch, just-in-time provisioning to the correct Azure IoT hub without requiring human intervention, enabling customers to provision millions of devices in a secure and scalable manner.

We’re pleased to announce that Azure IoT Tools extension for Visual Studio Code now supports the Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service. You can now view your Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Services without leaving Visual Studio Code.

Try it out

Please don’t hesitate to give it a try! If you have any feedback, feel free to reach us at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-azure-iot-tools/issues. We will continuously improve our IoT developer experience to empower every IoT developers on the planet to achieve more!

The post Azure IoT Tools October Update: new experience of sending device-to-cloud messages and more! appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

The first step is often the hardest. Do you find yourself with great ideas for the next awesome app, website, or game but you never get around to making that first leap into the unknown? Today, I’ll help you with that! In this blog post, I’m going to walk through how to get started with Visual Studio for Mac.

Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS-native .NET IDE that focuses on .NET Core, Xamarin, and Unity. It provides many of the same features as Visual Studio for Windows, such as a shared C#, XAML, and web editor. For more information on Visual Studio for Mac, see our documentation.

Installation

Before writing any code, you’ll first need to download Visual Studio for Mac from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac/. Once downloaded, click on the .dmg to launch it. Double-click the installer icon to mount it and start your install experience. Click Open if you’re prompted with security messages.

Once the installer launches, agree to the licensing terms by pressing Continue.

On the component selection screen, illustrated below, you can select the components you want to install. The component you need to install depends on the type of app that you want to create:

• .NET Core: Allows you to create .NET Core apps and libraries, ASP.NET Core Web apps, and Azure Functions.
• Android: Allows you to build native Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms apps targeting the Android platform. Selecting this will also install OpenJDK and the latest Android SDK, both of which are required for Android development.
• iOS: Allows you to build native Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms apps targeting iOS.
• macOS: Allows you to build native Xamarin.Mac apps.

Note that you’ll need to separately install Xcode if you want to develop for iOS or Mac. I recommend that you do this once Visual Studio for Mac has finished installing.

In this post, I want to create an Azure Function, so I want to select the .NET Core option. Once you click Install, the installation will take approximately 10 minutes depending on how many components you selected and your internet speed.

You’ll be prompted to log in with your Microsoft account if this is your first time launching Visual Studio for Mac. I’m going to log in now to activate my Enterprise license and make it easier to publish my Function to Azure.

if you don’t have an Azure or Microsoft account, you can get one totally free ! This also comes with over $200 free Azure credits to spend as you see fit.

Next, you can configure the IDE to work in a way that works for you through keyboard shortcuts. I’m going to stick with Visual Studio for Mac shortcuts, but the bindings can be changed later through the Preferences menu item.

Visual Studio for Mac will then greet you with the Start Window. From here you can open an existing project from your machine, create a new project, or browse through a list of recent projects. However, before you go any further, you might want to make some changes so the IDE really works for you. This can all be done through the Preferences menu item (Visual Studio > Preferences), similar to Tools > Options in Visual Studio. Personally, I like to change to the dark theme and change my font to something bigger. I also like to show invisible characters on selection.

Create a new project

Now that you have the IDE configured in a way that works for you, you’re ready to start writing code! In the Start Window select New and then select Cloud > General > Azure Functions. In this example, I’m just using the HTTP Trigger, but you can use any template. For more information on other templates, see the Azure Functions documentation on docs.microsoft.com.

Name your project, press Next, set the Authorization level to Anonymous and click Next. If you want to use Git for version control, you can set that while creating the project. Click Create to open your project in Visual Studio for Mac:

Your solution and project will be loaded and should look like the image above. The most important parts of the IDE are described below:

1. Solution Pad ­– The solution pad organizes all the projects, files, and folders in a solution. You can right-click on any item here to see its context actions allowing you to do things such as add references and publish to azure.
2. Code Editor – This is where you will likely spend most of your time. This editor shares the same code components with Visual Studio, but with a native macOS UI. For more information in the editor, see the Source Editor docs.
3. Debug/Run Controls ­– You can use the dropdown menus to set your run configuration, including the device or platform that you want to deploy to. When you’re ready to go, press the triangular “Start” button.
4. Search Box – Search within your project, commands, or for a NuGet package from here.
5. Workspace – The workspace consists of a main document area (an editor, designer surface, or options file) surrounded by pads containing useful information for the task at hand.
6. Additional Pads – Visual Studio for Mac Pads are analogous to Panes in Visual Studio – they’re used to show additional information, tools, and navigation aids. Depending on the type of task, different pads will be displayed automatically. For more information on using pads in your workspace, refer to the Customizing the IDE documentation.

You’re now ready to start writing some code and creating something great!

Going further

• Setting up a git repository.
• Resources on building ASP.NET Core apps using Visual Studio for Mac.
• Creating a Xamarin.Forms app.
• If you’re more familiar with Visual Studio, see our guide on some of the main differences.
• Make sure to keep up-to-date by updating.

Happy Developing! If you have any feedback or suggestions, please leave them in the comments below. You can also reach out to us on Twitter at @VisualStudioMac. For any issues that you run into when using Visual Studio for Mac, please Report a Problem.

The post Get Started with Visual Studio for Mac appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

There is a lot of developer goodness happening at Ignite this week. Visual Studio Online is available as a public preview for developers to try cloud hosted development environments with your tool of choice. Visual Studio 2019 version 16.4 Preview 3 and Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.3 Preview 2 just released with tons of new productivity features. There are also a bunch of great sessions that deep dive into all this and much more.

Welcome to the family Visual Studio Online

Today Visual Studio Online moved to a public preview; providing managed, on-demand development environments for long-term projects, to quickly prototype a new feature, or for quick tasks like reviewing pull requests. You can work with environments from any device using Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio 2019 or the built-in browser-based editor. The features for connecting to a cloud environment from the Visual Studio 2019 IDE are available in private preview. Read more about the exciting announcement in the Visual Studio Online blog post.

The Visual Studio 2019 IDE can also create and connect to Visual Studio Online environments and take advantage of all the benefits of a cloud powered development environment to build any application.

• Get up and running quickly by letting Visual Studio Online install runtimes, SDKs and dev tools
• Create environments quickly to isolate your work across different projects
• Spin up extra capacity with a premium environment to gives you the memory and compute to run your toughest workloads
• Give your teammates a ready to go environment for rich code reviews without tying up your dev box or asking anyone to setup their own environment

We’re eager to invite developers that love working in a full IDE to join our private preview.

Visual Studio 2019 version 16.4 Preview 3 is here

Preview 3 of Visual Studio 2019 version 16.4 is now available. If you aren’t already running the Preview builds you can download and try out the latest side by side with our current version of Visual Studio. Of course, if you already have a Preview installed just click the notification or go to Help menu and click Check for updates.

Speedy code navigation

In 16.3 we introduced file search for all languages and semantic code search for C# and VB into the new Search bar. In 16.4 we have rewritten the Find in files tool window to address suggestions and feedback on the most popular search control in the IDE. Performance has been significantly improved and reliability issues that previously led to frustrating hangs have been fixed. We cleaned up the UI and added a few improvements like adding exclusions to a search query.

IntelliSense without Using Directives

IntelliSense is indispensable for browsing and finding members of a type but if you’re missing a Using directive you might not find what you need. In 16.4 IntelliSense shows members and types for any assemblies referenced from your project and automatically adds the Using directive to keep your code neat and tidy.

IntelliCode helps with argument completion

IntelliCode saves you time by putting what you’re most likely to use at the top of your IntelliSense completion list. IntelliCode can also provide suggestion for arguments as you type, bringing the most likely arguments to the top of your completion list. Set your cursor on a method and type CTRL+SPACE to give it a try.

Automatically re-train and acquire IntelliCode team models

Since we released the ability to create team models trained on your own code last year, we’ve heard feedback that sharing team models through links can be cumbersome and it’s difficult to remember to retrain your models. With our new Azure DevOps task and automatic acquisition of models, you can set up your pipeline to take care of team model updates and automatically share the model with others working in the same repository.

Refactoring with help from IntelliCode

ItelliCode goes beyond smarter IntelliSense. IntelliCode learns from your edits and provides refactoring suggestions for repeated edits as you type. IntelliCode understands the syntactic structure of your changes so suggestions include locations with similar structure but different variables and formatting. These suggestions appear with your other refactoring quick fixes and are available from the CTRL + ”.” shortcut. Remember to enable this early IntelliCode feature from Tools Options.

More real estate for code and easier navigation with vertical document tabs

We’re excited to include with 16.4 the most popular customer suggestion, vertical document tabs. Real estate for code is a premium in many environments. Vertical document tabs give vertical space to your source code while better utilizing your horizontal screen space. Stretch to bring long file names into view, sort tabs alphabetically and use tab groups to get more code on the screen.

XAML code editor pop up, merge resource dictionaries and more

In this release there are multiple new features for desktop developers building WPF or UWP applications. One such feature is the ability to open the XAML code editor window separately from the XAML designer using our new “pop up” button next to XAML tab:

Other features include the ability to easily merge an existing resource dictionary into your application with our new solution explorer command “Merge Resource Dictionary Into Active Window”, the ability to filter Live Visual Tree to “Just My XAML” and more. For a complete list of what’s new for desktop developers see the release notes.

Audio calls and app sharing for desktop apps in Live Share

Real time collaboration with Live Share opens the door for pair programming, rich code reviews, and help from experts even when they are remote. A quick call can often provide more context behind the code. Now the Live share tool window lets you start an audio call with other collaborators in a Live Share session.

You can now App Share a desktop and web apps in a Live Share conversation. Start a Live Share conversation with another developer or tester and start debugging. Guests will see the same running app you see on your local machine. They can even interact with the application and trigger breakpoints in the debugger.

Pin Properties in the Debugger

Identifying objects by their properties while debugging has just become easier and more discoverable with the new Pinnable Properties tool. In short, hover over a property you want to display in the debugger window of the Watch, Autos, and Locals windows, click that pin icon, and immediately see the information you are looking for at the top of your display!

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.4 Preview 2

Today we’re releasing Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.4 Preview 2. This is an exciting release because it adds significant accessibility improvements to the overall IDE as well as support for .NET Core 3.1 Preview and full Blazor (server-side) support. With the latest version you can create, build, debug and run Blazor projects and then deploy your Blazor app directly to Azure without ever leaving the IDE. Learn more about this release on the latest Visual Studio for Mac blog post.

Ignite sessions to check out this week

The above is just a glimpse of the developer topics that will be covered at Microsoft Ignite this week. Make sure you head on over to https://www.microsoft.com/ignite to catch the following sessions and more. Times listed are in Eastern Time (ET).

If you’re at the event in Orlando this week, be sure to stop by the Development & Architecture Center to chat with our team and catch one of the many theater and lightning talks. There are also hands-on workshops throughout the week for you to experience these technologies first-hand.

Thanks,
Anthony & the entire Visual Studio team

The post All Things Developer Tools at Microsoft Ignite appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

Today we released the latest preview, Preview 2, of Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.4. This preview comes with several exciting new features which we would love for you to try out. To get the preview:

• If you haven’t already, first download and install Visual Studio 2019 for Mac
• Switch to the preview version

Updates in this preview

The focus of this preview is around accessibility improvements and .NET Core and ASP.NET Core. Let’s dive into the details of the updates.

Accessibility Enhancements

Ensuring Visual Studio for Mac can be used by all users is important to us and we realize the need to support various assistive technologies to make this happen. Visual Studio for Mac previously had some built-in accessibility features compatible with VoiceOver and other assistive technologies. With the release of Preview 2, we’ve increased the surface area of the IDE accessible by assistive services to include several commonly used parts that were previously inaccessible.

Those using assistive technologies will find general improvements over the entire IDE that include focus order, contrast, reduction of keyboard traps, more accurate VoiceOver navigation and reading, and more. We’ve also rewritten the UI for the debugger to make it accessible with VoiceOver.

Improving accessibility of Visual Studio for Mac is a top priority for our team. While we have made rapid progress in this area recently, we are looking for some real-world users to assist in guiding the work. Try this preview and reach out to us to let us know what scenarios are working well and what and are not. If you would like to directly engage with us on our accessibility work, please email Dominic Nahous, the lead PM for the initiative at dominicn@microsoft.com. Now let’s move on to discuss the .NET Core specific updates.

.NET Core 3.1 Preview support

In this release, we have added support for the latest preview of the .NET Core 3.1 SDK Preview 2. When you install the preview version of the IDE, that version of the .NET Core SDK will be installed automatically. We have full support for .NET Core 3.1 Preview 2 projects including: creating new projects, editing, building, debugging and other features.

ASP.NET Core Blazor Server Support

In this release we are adding support for developing and publishing ASP.NET Core Blazor Server applications. If you haven’t heard of Blazor, it’s a framework for building interactive client-side web UI with .NET. Here are some of the advantages of using Blazor.

• Write code in C# instead of JavaScript.
• Leverage the existing .NET ecosystem of .NET libraries.
• Share app logic across server and client.
• Benefit from .NET’s performance, reliability, and security.
• Stay productive with Visual Studio 2019 on PC, Linux, and macOS.
• Build on a common set of languages, frameworks, and tools that are stable, feature-rich, and easy to use.

In Visual Studio 2019 for Mac 8.4 Preview 2 you can create new Blazor server projects as well as get the standard support you would expect such as building, running and debugging Blazor projects. As you can see, the Blazor Server App project template is now available in the New Project dialog.

One of the areas where the team has focused on this release was adding support for editing .razor files. These are the files that you’ll be using when creating Blazor applications. If you’ve edited these files in the Windows version of Visual Studio 2019, then you’ll be very comfortable in Visual Studio 2019 for Mac. Both the Windows and Mac version of the IDE share the same editor for .razor files. You’ll see full colorization and completion support for your .razor files including completions for Razor components declared in the project.

You can also publish Blazor applications directly to Azure App Service. And if you don’t have an Azure account to run your Blazor app on Azure, you can always sign up for a free one here that also comes 12 months of free popular services, $200 free Azure credits, and over 25 always free services.

Updates to the editing experience

As mentioned before, the editor in Visual Studio for Mac now supports full colorization, IntelliSense and completion for .razor files. In addition to adding Blazor support, we’ve been hard at work adding features that have been top requests from our community. The biggest change that you will notice is that we brought back preview boxes for any code changes that may occur from a code fix or analysis suggestion. In the screenshot below, we see a preview of the changes that will occur if I use the “Make Static” codefix provided by Roslyn.

To celebrate the new preview view, we are also providing several new code fixes like the aforementioned “Make Static” as well as the ability to add null checks to each parameter of a method.

Finally, you may have noticed in the screenshots that the coloring looks more like what you may be used to on Visual Studio for PC. We’ve been working to standardize the Visual Studio theme, and we will be making more progress in this area in the releases ahead, so stay tuned!

Pack support for .NET Core library projects

When creating .NET Core class libraries, you may be interested in distributing your library to a larger audience. To do this you need to create a NuGet package from your class library. In Visual Studio for Mac we made it very easy to create a NuGet package from a .NET Core library project. You right-click your project and then select the Pack menu option as per the example below:

After invoking the Pack menu option for a library project, you will find the NuGet package (.nupkg file) in the output folder. This experience is consistent with that in Visual Studio on PC.

Download and try today

If you haven’t already make sure to download Visual Studio 2019 for Mac and then switch to the preview channel. With this release we are hoping that you’ll be able to easily get started with .NET Core 3.1 as well as Blazor Server applications. We encourage you to leave your comments either below in this post or by submitting issues to the developer community via Report a Problem.

If you’re interested in upcoming releaseses, you’ll be happy to know that we have recently updated the Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Roadmap so please take a look and let us know your thoughts.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter at @VisualStudioMac and reach out to the team. Customer feedback is important to us and we would love to hear your thoughts. Alternatively, you can head over to Visual Studio Developer Community to track your issues, suggest a feature, ask questions, and find answers from others. We use your feedback to continue to improve Visual Studio for Mac 2019, so thank you again on behalf of our entire team.

The post Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.4 Preview 2, now available appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

TL;DR

Available beginning at Microsoft’s Ignite conference as a public preview, Visual Studio Online provides managed, on-demand development environments that can be used for long-term projects, to quickly prototype a new feature, or for short-term tasks like reviewing pull requests. You can work with environments from anywhere using either Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio IDE (in private preview), or the included browser-based editor.

Empowering Modern Development

Software developers, and the software development process, live on the bleeding edge of technological trends. We talk to developers every day, and we’ve heard that expectations for innovation continue to increase across all industries and sectors. We’ve also noted resounding feedback that the confluence of current trends demands a new breed of development tools and capabilities.

These trends include:

• More and more teams are distributed remotely, or leveraging freelancers, which magnify the pain of onboarding new team members without the benefit of a local IT presence.
• Open source and inner source are making collaboration more important than ever. As a result, developers are working across boundaries in many codebases, often at the same time.
• Increasing computational and data workloads (e.g. Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data), powered by cloud computing, are naturally shifting development activities beyond the “standard issue development laptop”.
• The explosion of cloud native development and microservices have enabled developers to use multiple languages and stacks in a single system to take advantage of each technology’s particular strengths.
• Developers facing expectations for decreased time-to-market are seeking techniques and technologies to help them collaborate more quickly and increase productivity.

As a result of your feedback, these trends, and what we have learned with Visual Studio Code Remote Development, we have been working hard on a new service called Visual Studio Online. Visual Studio Online philosophically (and technically) extends Visual Studio Code Remote Development to provide managed development environments that can be created on-demand and accessed from anywhere. These environments can be used for long-term projects, to quickly prototype a new feature, or for short-term tasks like reviewing pull requests. Additionally, since many companies already have existing infrastructure for development, we made sure that Visual Studio Online can take advantage of those as well. You can connect to your environments from anywhere using either Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio IDE (see below), or the included browser-based editor.

We’re excited to get your feedback as we launch Visual Studio Online into public preview. Read on to learn more about the service and the scenarios it enables, or dive right in with one of our quickstarts.

Rapid Onboarding

Development environments are the cornerstone on which Visual Studio Online is based. They’re where all of the compute associated with software development happens: compiling, debugging, restoring, etc. Whatever your project or task, you can spin up a Visual Studio Online environment from your development tool of choice or our web portal, and the service will automatically configure everything you need: the source code, runtime, compiler, debugger, editor, personal dotfile configurations, relevant editor extensions and more.

Environments are fast to create and disposable, allowing new team members to quickly onboard to a project, or for you to experiment with a new stack, language, or codebase, without worrying about it affecting your local configuration. And since environments share definitions, they are created in a repeatable manner – all but eliminating configuration discrepancies between team members that often lead to “works on my machine” type bugs.

Additionally, environments are completely configurable so they can be precisely tuned as required by your project. Start simple by specifying a few extensions that you want installed, or take full control over the environment by defining your own Dockerfile.

Cloud Powered

Visual Studio Online’s development environments are Azure-hosted and come with all the benefits of the cloud:

• They scale to meet your needs:
  • Create as many as you want (up to subscription limits) for all your various projects and tasks and throw them away when you’re done.
  • Need a little extra horsepower? Create a premium environment to get all the CPU and RAM you’d need to tackle even the most demanding projects.
• They have predictable pricing and you only pay for what you use – down to the second. If you create an environment and delete it after 6 minutes and 45 seconds, you’ll only pay for 6 minutes and 45 seconds. Environments also auto-suspend to eliminate accidental runoff costs.
• Moving your development workload to the cloud boosts your overall computing power so your personal machine can edit media assets, email, chat, stream music, or do anything else, more.

Already have investments in on-premise development environments, or not quite yet ready to move a workload to the cloud? Visual Studio Online also allows you to register and connect your own self-hosted environments, so you can use that already-perfectly-tuned environment and experience some of the benefits of Visual Studio Online, for free!

Your Favorite Tools

Visual Studio Online supports three editors: Visual Studio Code, our no-install browser-based editor, and Visual Studio IDE (see below). This allows you to use the tool you’re most comfortable with, in any language or framework.

By installing the Visual Studio Online extension you can use Visual Studio Code, the streamlined code editor with support for operations like debugging, task running, and version control. It aims to provide just the tools a developer needs for a quick code-build-debug cycle. It’s free, built on open source and now enhanced with cloud powered development environments.

Visual Studio Online’s browser-based editor adds the ability to connect and code from literally anywhere, and its fully powered with Visual Studio Code under the hood. Gone are the days of lugging around heavy dev machines on the road or to a coffee shop. Instead, travel light knowing you’ve got the full computing power of Azure, just a new browser tab away.

We’re also proud to announce that Visual Studio IDE’s support for Visual Studio Online is in private preview at Ignite. Developers will now have the option to use a full-fledged IDE with the entire toolset, from initial design to final deployment, enhanced with the benefits of Visual Studio Online. Along with this private preview, we’re also introducing the capability to create Windows based Visual Studio Online environments, expanding the set of workloads the service will support. Sign up now to be added to the wait list.

Along the way we’ve also learned that developers not only want to use the right tool for the job, but they are also highly opinionated about their development environment, and commonly spend countless hours personalizing their editor and terminal. To address this, Visual Studio Online’s flexible personalization features make any environment you connect to feel familiar, as if you’ve never left home, whichever editor you decide to use.

Even better, you can freely extend these capabilities since Visual Studio Online has support for the rich ecosystem of extensions in the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Effortless Remote Debugging

Once connected to your Visual Studio Online environment, simply run your web app or API as you usually would, and we automatically forward it, so that it’s accessible to you – and only you. It behaves just like your traditional, local dev workflow.

In addition, we’ll soon be introducing support for app casting, that will allow you to remotely interact with and share a running GUI application.

Built in Collaboration

On top of all of this, Visual Studio Online’s environments come with built in collaboration tools like IntelliCode and Live Share. IntelliCode helps enhance individual productivity by instilling AI-assisted intelligence into the editor. It does this by making things like auto-completion smarter with “implicit collaboration” based on an understanding of how APIs are used across thousands of open-source GitHub repositories. Live Share directly facilitates real-time collaboration by enabling developers to edit and debug together, even if they aren’t all Visual Studio Online users, or prefer a different editor.

And More to Come!

Visual Studio Online is in public preview at Ignite. That means that now is a great time to try it out and share your feedback. We’re eagerly looking forward to working with the community to understand the best ways to make Visual Studio Online even better.

I want to thank all the users who have submitted feedback already – you’re the ones who have made the service as great as it is today – and I can’t wait to hear from so many more of you.

Next Steps

If you’d like to learn more, head over to our product page or “What is Visual Studio Online?” documentation.

To try the service, follow along with our Visual Studio Code or browser-based experience quickstarts.

As mentioned above, if you’re interested in Visual Studio IDE support and Windows based environments, sign up for our private preview and we’ll do our best to grant you access as soon as possible.

Finally, feel free to report any feedback you have in our issue tracker on GitHub.

We can’t wait to hear what you think!

Thanks,
Nik Molnar & the entire Visual Studio Online team

The post Announcing Visual Studio Online Public Preview appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

TL;DR:

Harnessing the wisdom of the community, Visual Studio IntelliCode is revolutionizing developer productivity. We started with AI-assisted IntelliSense and are now expanding the application of artificial intelligence to significantly accelerate learning, radically improve development agility, and increase code quality by means of two exciting new capabilities: whole line completions and refactoring.

Technology is evolving so fast that every developer is constantly learning, whether you’re adopting a new programming language, API, or architecture (e.g. microservices). Amidst this rate of technological change, existing tools are no longer sufficient for achieving agility as development teams are trying to accelerate their time-to-market  and increase code quality. As a result, development tools need to radically evolve to satisfy the productivity demands of modern teams.

At Microsoft Ignite, we showed a vision of how AI can be applied to developer tools. After talking with thousands of developers over the last couple years, we found that the most highly effective assistance can only come from one source: the collective knowledge of the open source, GitHub community. This is exactly what IntelliCode provides.

AI-assisted suggestions + whole-line code completions

IntelliCode now provides whole-line code completion suggestions mined from the collective intelligence of your trusted developer knowledge bases. This is like having an AI-developer pair-programming with you, providing meaningful, suggestions and whole-line code completions without disrupting your flow. To generate accurate suggestions and provide completion assistance as you code, IntelliCode extends the GPT-2 transformer language model for our machine-learning models to learn about programming languages and coding patterns.

The GPT model architecture, originally developed by OpenAI, has demonstrated strong natural language understanding, including the ability to generate conditional synthetic text examples without needing domain-specific training datasets. For our initial language-specific base models, we adopted an unsupervised learning approach that learns from over 3000 top GitHub repositories. Our base model extracts statistical coding patterns and learns the intricacies of programming languages from GitHub repos to assist developers in their coding. Based on code context, as you type, IntelliCode uses that semantic information and sourced patterns to predict the most likely completion in-line with your code.

IntelliCode has now extended our machine-learning model training capabilities beyond the initial base model to enable your  teams to train their own team completions. Team completions are useful if your development team uses internal utility and base class libraries or domain-specific libraries that aren’t commonly used in open-source GitHub repositories. If you’re using code that isn’t in that set of GitHub repos, those recommendations aren’t as useful to you. By training on your team’s code, IntelliCode learns patterns from your code to make more accurate suggestions. This enables your  team to accelerate  learning and take advantage of the knowledge of your team and broader community.

AI-assisted Refactoring

IntelliCode watches code changes as they occur in the IDE and locally synthesizes, on demand, edit scripts from any set of repetitive pattern changes. It uses these edit scripts to produce suggestions, enabling you to apply repetitive changes quickly or create a pull request to apply the suggestion(s) for team review without distracting your current work. IntelliCode refactorings take the time-intensity and error-proneness out of routine tasks, such as introducing a new helper function. To do so, IntelliCode uses an AI technology called program synthesis, and more specifically, programming-by-examples (PBE).

PBE technology has been developed at Microsoft by the PROSE team and has been applied to various products to enable users to streamline repetitive tasks after providing a few examples. You’ve seen PBE in action in Flash Fill in Excel and webpage table extraction in PowerBI. IntelliCode advances the state-of-the-art in PBE by allowing patterns to be learned from noisy traces as opposed to explicitly provided examples, without any additional steps on your part. You can read more about this in this earlier post. We’re planning to broaden this capability to more languages, as well as enabling your team easily benefit from the patterns that you find.

What about privacy and code security?

We know that your code is a vital business asset, so we are committed to a simple principle across our developer tools and services: your code remains your code, your models are your models, and remain your models unless you choose to share them with others. You control when to utilize AI-assistance and who has access to your data.

As examples of this principle in action, when we train a team model for IntelliCode completions on your codebase, we don’t share that model with anyone but you unless you choose to share it, and we locally extract only those elements of the code that are needed to create a model for recommending completion values. We also make it easy for you to ensure that access to your model follows the same security access rules as your code repo when shared, with no extra configuration. You can read more about this in the documentation.

Our PROSE-based models work entirely locally, so your code never leaves your machine.

When it is necessary for us to use a service-based model to deliver a feature, we ensure all appropriate security is in place to secure any information (including code) that is transmitted over the network – the documentation has more information.

What’s next? 

Our ambition is to contribute to developer-assistance across the whole developer lifecycle. We’re particularly interested in making learning and retrieving typical code snippets whilst learning a new API or re-learning an old one, a lot easier. We continue to listen hard to our developer community about where we can best contribute to assist with your daily development challenges.

Get the latest Visual Studio 2019 previews; there, you can try much of this out for C# already. Watch the Visual Studio blog for more announcements as we make progress.

You can also sign up for regular updates and invitations to future private previews.

Try it now

You can try out IntelliCode team models and refactorings in Visual Studio for C# by downloading our latest Visual Studio Preview.

We also support a variety of languages in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code:

• Visual Studio: C#, C++, JS/TS, XAML
• Visual Studio Code: Python, JS/TS, Java, SQL

Happy coding!

The post Re-imagining developer productivity with AI-assisted tools appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

In September, we shared Visual Studio 2019 for Mac v8.3 with you – this was our biggest release yet for .NET developers working on a Mac. Today, we’d like to invite you to take part in a new community challenge in which you can interact directly with our team to improve Visual Studio for Mac, explore some great looking ASP.NET Core samples, and earn prizes!

Taking the ASP.NET Core Challenge

Are you ready to jump in? There are just three simple steps to enter:

Download the Visual Studio for Mac 8.3 release or update to it from within the IDE using the Stable channel in the Updater.

Now, create or modify an ASP.NET Core site with a web UI using Visual Studio for Mac; you can use the samples from the control libraries mentioned below, or build your own. We only ask that you try our new HTML/CSHTML, CSS, or JavaScript/TypeScript editors.

Finally, send us a Tweet of the UI that you build, using the @VisualStudioMac handle on Twitter along with the hashtags #vs4macChallenge #sweepstakes. Include a screen shot of your running app and an example of the source code you used, running in Visual Studio for Mac! We’ll reply with a survey you can take to share your experience. The survey will also allow you to share your contact information with us if you’d like to be entered for a chance to get swag.

Swag!

To thank you for your time submitting and filling out our follow-up survey, we have some fun swag giveaways for you! Each submission is entered into a random drawing for 1 of:

• 3 grand prizes: A product license from GrapeCity, Syncfusion, or Progress. Or,
• 100 first prizes: A $15.00 voucher for the .NET Foundation Store, to purchase a shirt or stickers.

To be eligible, you’ll need to share your email address with us in the survey mentioned earlier.

For more details on eligibility, please read the Official Rules for this sweepstakes.

ASP.NET Core Samples to help you out

To give you some interesting new samples to explore in this challenge, 3 great ASP.NET Core control libraries for you to check out. Each of them has been a great help pulling together some Mac-based instructions to help you get started:

• GrapeCity ComponentOne
• Syncfusion Essential Studio for ASP.NET Core
• Progress Telerik UI for ASP.NET Core

If you have other favorite libraries you prefer to use, that’s great! Just let us know what you used as part of your contest submission.

Go forth and code!

This challenge starts today, November 5^th and goes until November 19^th, and we’ll share out the end results by November 22^nd.  As you work with Visual Studio for Mac and build out your app, feel free chat with us on Twitter via @VisualStudioMac. Now, go have fun and code!

The post Join the Visual Studio for Mac ASP.NET Core Challenge appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

The power of Visual Studio for desktop and mobile development is unmatched in the industry, and we wanted to ensure that the best in class also had the best collaboration story. Live Share is reimagining this collaboration story by reducing the barriers to collaboration, increasing the fidelity of the collaboration experience while building desktop apps, and enhancing this workflow.

One of the barriers to collaboration for Visual Studio desktop, mobile and console application development was the inability to effectively share your progress while working on an app with your peer. With the VS16.4 release you will now be able to share your application from within a collaboration session.  With the cumbersome process of creating and sharing links to start a collaboration session. collaboration did not feel as intuitive. To solve this problem and make collaboration as low-touch as possible, we now have contacts in Live Share that are auto-populated with your recent and contextual collaborators, who can be directly invited to a collaboration session. With all of these new changes, we have also enhanced the interactiveness of a Live Share session with in-built audio calling.

Application casting with contacts can enhance your collaboration workflow, whether it is for your scheduled pairing session, or for debugging a bug with someone with expertise on your team. You don’t need to lose the comfort of your IDE to make progress on blockers in your code. We know that good code takes multiple eyes on it, and with direct invitations to your contacts you easily collaborate with your team.

Getting started with app casting and contacts

To use Live Share with app casting and add contacts, make sure you have Visual Studio 16.4 or higher. Once you have this version of Visual Studio, your Live Share extension will come with app casting when you choose to be an insider. To become an Insider, go to: Tools > Options > Live Share > General > Features and set it to Insiders, as seen in the screenshot below.

With Insiders enabled, you will receive all the coolest new features of Live Share. Live Share is now enabled with not just app casting and contacts, but also VS Live Share Audio. You can jump on a quick call from within a Live Share session without context switching to any other application, thereby extending  your coding productivity time.

Directly invite your peers

Contacts will appear automatically once you are an Insider under your contacts pane and are under two categories,

1. Recent Contacts

These are developers you have previously collaborated with using Live Share. In practice, most developers frequently collaborate with the same people, and therefore, the recent list enables a more repeatable means of working with your team/classroom/etc.

2. Suggested Contacts

These are developers that have contributed to your currently open project within the last 30 days. In practice, these are the folks you are likely to want to collaborate with, and therefore, we suggest them in order to make it easier to get started.

All your contacts can be invited directly to a Live Share session from within your editor. They’ll get a toast notification that gives them the option to join the session or not. This removes the need to exchange session URLs entirely.

Share your status

With contacts, comes the ability to signal your availability for collaboration. Live Share contacts allow you to set your status to Available, Do Not Disturb, Away or Offline. The idea is to provide you the ability to choose the level of interaction you would like to have with your peers without the need to context switch. Its not only easy to directly invite contacts now, but also to let them know that you are not available to collaborate. You can read up more on how contacts and statuses work here.

Just hit F5

To share the desktop app, you are working on with your peer from within a Live Share session, just start a debug session with F5 . The screenshot below shows an Expense Reporting WPF application being worked on during a Live Share session.

When the host of the session presses f5 to start a debugging session, the app auto launches, and the guest can view the application on their side as well. All participants in the session can interact with the application (and  ) and modify it together without committing any changes .

App casting currently works for UWP, WinForms, Win32 C++ apps, C++ and CMake console apps with many more to come!

Call from within your IDE

Now you have app casting working and can share your entire working picture with your peer, but sometimes you really need to talk over the fine details. For this, Live Share has in-built audio calling from within your session! The ability to do an audio call from within your IDE allows you to be productive without context switching out of your focus mode while developing.

Let us know what you think!

With app casting your debugging sessions can be a powerful place to do real-time collaboration and make progress on hard bugs. With direct invitations and status sharing with contacts you now have a new ease to your collaboration process.

We love hearing from you, so tell us what you think about this new feature, and how else you plan to use it alongside audio calling, by leaving feedback here.

You can follow Live Share’s newest offerings through our GitHub release notes, and file for feature requests to let us know what you would like to see us offer next.

The post Re-imagining collaboration for Visual Studio with Live Share app casting and contacts appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

The great debates in computing all have one common theme. Whether it is tabs vs. spaces or Vi vs. Emacs, the thread linking all these debates together is keyboard efficiency. The truth is, we spend tons of hours working in an application, and keyboard shortcuts become automatic to us, the same muscle memory that great pianists or sports players have. If you suddenly give a virtuoso pianist a piano where the keys are half as wide and the sharp/flat keys are below as opposed to above the natural keys, they will struggle to make even the most basic melodies while they learn the new arrangement. Likewise, when it comes to keyboard shortcuts in your favorite IDE, any change can be disorienting quickly. Luckily, Visual Studio for Mac offers a ton of customizations to key bindings that will allow you get configure your key combinations to your liking.

First Run

New users to Visual Studio for Mac will notice right away that the IDE offers support for many different key mappings. The first time Visual Studio for Mac is launched on a computer, you will receive a prompt directing you to pick your favorite key mapping.

Here, you can select from four different key mappings to help you be as productive as possible from the first line of code you write. But what if you want even more customizations? Well, Visual Studio for Mac has you covered there as well!

More Customizing

While setting a default keymap is certainly handy, it doesn’t solve all circumstances. There may be custom mappings that you’ve used in other IDEs, or specific commands that are outside the bounds of the array of preconfigured options. With the Key Bindings selection window, you can map every possible command within the IDE to a specific key. To see the Key Binding options, select Visual Studio > Preferences > Environment > Key Bindings.

There are several features that I want to point out in this window, and I will take you through them one by one. The most immediate option you see is that there is a dropdown available for various “Schemes” which map to the options that new users see when they first install the IDE. Here you can select from many different pre-packaged key bindings, such as Visual Studio, VS Code and Xcode.

But what if you want even more control? What if you really, really want “Find Derived Symbols” to be mapped to Control-Option-D? Setting custom keybindings is super easy in Visual Studio for Mac. To get started, you can either scroll through the list of available commands, or search for the command in the search box. The list of available commands is organized by type of command and can be collapsed for easier navigation. Once you find the command you would like to map, you can select it and then type the desired key binding in “Edit Binding” followed by clicking “Apply”. In the below GIF, I set the binding for “New Breakpoint” to Control-Shift-B.

You can also edit an existing breakpoint in a very similar manner. In the below GIF, you can see how to edit the “New File” command to map to Control-Shift-N from the default Command-N. You’ll notice that all I need to do is type in the command I prefer and click apply. If you want to add multiple bindings, simply click “Add” instead of “Apply”.

Finally, with so many commands to remember, it can sometimes be hard to keep track and avoid duplicates. To ensure that each key binding is unique, Visual Studio for Mac checks against all configured commands and warns you of a duplicate if one is detected. It will also check for command duplication, so you can either replace the original or your newly created binding. The GIF below shows what happens when mapping the “New Breakpoint” command to the “Command-C” keyboard binding which conflicts with “Copy”.

Now that you know how to edit the key mappings in any way you see fit, you can fully customize the IDE and get to writing code the way you love! If you want to see more key binding information, please check out our Toolbox video on the subject on Channel 9

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please leave them in the comments below. You can also reach out to us on Twitter at @VisualStudioMac. For any issues that you run into when using Visual Studio for Mac, please Report a Problem.

The post Visual Studio for Mac: Take Control of Your IDE with Keybindings appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

Visual Studio IntelliCode uses machine learning to offer useful, contextually-rich code completion suggestions as you type, allowing you to learn APIs more quickly and code faster. Although IntelliCode’s base model was trained on over 3000 top open source C# GitHub repositories, it does not include all the custom types in your code base. To produce useful, high-fidelity, contextually-rich suggestions, the model needs to be tailored to unique types or domain-specific APIs that aren’t used in open source code. To make IntelliSense recommendations based on the wisdom of your team’s codebase, the model needs to train with your team’s code.

Earlier this year, we extended our ML model training capabilities beyond our initial Github trained base model to enable you to personalize your IntelliCode completion suggestions by creating team models trained on your own code.

Team completions shared and automated easily!

Your team completions become part of your normal developer workflow just by associating a model to your repo. Anyone with access to your repository, automatically gets team completions – no extra configuration steps are required!

Once you’re ready, you can keep your completions up-to-date with our new Azure DevOps task that can retrain your models on CI. When a change is made to your codebase, the model is automatically trained and shared with your team.

2 steps to team completions

Set up and share

Repository-associated models are automatically shared with others working in the same codebase as long as users have enabled automatic acquisition of team models in Visual Studio. To enable automatic acquisition by going to Tools > Options > IntelliCode > Acquire team models for completion. Access to the repository is access to the model. When training, we collect some information about the checked-out commit where the training took place. Anyone who requests that model must have the same commit in their repository and be able to produce the same information that was collected during training to receive the team model.

Please note that you’ll need to be on at least Visual Studio 2019 version 16.4 preview 5 to try out these updates to the IntelliCode team completions experience.

See more details on how to acquire and share team completions here.

Automate

Once you’re happy with the team completions on you repo, you should set up to automatically retrain as part of your continuous integration (CI) pipeline in Azure Pipelines. When code changes are pushed to your repository, the build task runs and your team completions are retrained and made available to the repo. In parallel, Visual Studio checks for updates to team completions  and will update automatically .

Install the Visual Studio IntelliCode Team Model Training task from Visual Studio Marketplace to your Azure DevOps organization or Azure DevOps Server (formerly TFS).

See more details about how to configure and automate the build task here.

Tell us what you think!

We’d love to understand your current experience with IntelliCode and where we can improve. Try out sharing team completions and automating updates today and tell us what you think of the new experience. Please note that you’ll need to be on at least Visual Studio 2019 version 16.4 preview 5 to try out these updates to the IntelliCode team completions experience.

Please raise issues and comments Visual Studio “report a problem”.

We’re interested to hear feedback about the recommendations themselves, the performance of the feature, or any capabilities you might be missing.

To keep up with the future of AI-assisted development, sign up for our Insiders newsletter.

The post AI-assisted IntelliSense for your team’s codebase appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

Welcome to the November update of Azure IoT Tools!

In this November release, you will see the new standalone simulator for Azure IoT Edge development, the support of Vcpkg for IoT Plug and Play development and more new features.

Deploy Event Grid module on Azure IoT Edge

Event Grid on IoT Edge brings the power and flexibility of Azure Event Grid to the edge for all pub/sub and event driven scenarios. There are several ways to deploy Event Grid module in VS Code.

1. When adding a new module to your new or existing IoT Edge solution, now there is a new option to choose Azure Event Grid

2. When adding a new module to your new or existing IoT Edge solution, select Module from Azure Marketplace, you can see Azure Event Grid on IoT Edge.

3. In VS Code command palette, type and select Azure IoT Edge: Show Sample Gallery. You can open a new sample with pub/sub Functions along with Event Grid module.

Click here to learn more about Azure Event Grid on IoT Edge.

Standalone simulator for Azure IoT Edge development

For Azure IoT Edge developers, we have Azure IoT EdgeHub Dev Tool to provide a local development experience with a simulator for creating, developing, testing, running, and debugging Azure IoT Edge modules and solutions. However, the Azure IoT EdgeHub Dev Tool runs on top of Python environment. Not every Azure IoT Edge developers especially those using Windows as development environment has Python and Pip installed. Therefore, we have shipped a standalone simulator for Azure IoT EdgeHub Dev Tool so that developers who use Windows as development environment no longer need to setup Python environment. The standalone simulator has already been integrated in the latest release of Azure IoT Tools for Visual Studio Code. When you use Azure IoT Tools for Visual Studio Code,

Support Vcpkg for IoT Plug and Play development

Vcpkg is a cross-platform library manager that helps you manage C and C++ libraries on Windows, Linux and MacOS. With the support of Vcpkg for IoT Plug and Play development, developers could easily leverage the Vcpkg to manage the Azure IoT C device SDK as well as other C/C++ dependencies.

Previously, source code is the only way to include the Azure IoT C device SDK. Now, developers could generate device code stub of IoT Plug and Play via both Vcpkg and source code.

For more details with the step-by-step instructions, you can check out this tutorial to see how to create an IoT Plug and Play device via Vcpkg.

Configure an Embedded Linux C project using containerized device toolchain

We release the preview experience of containerized toolchain months ago aiming to simplify the toolchain acquisition efforts for device developers working on C / C++ project for Embedded Linux that requires the cross-compiling toolchain, device SDK and dependent libraries set up properly. Instead of doing this on local machine, which could lead to a messed-up environment, we provided a couple of common container images for devices with various architectures (e.g. ARMv7, ARM64 and x86).

And now you can further use this feature by configuring an existing C / C++ project you have to be able to compile in the container, and then deploy to the target device you use. If you want to further customize the container, we provided with extra device libraries and packages that are required for your device.

Check the tutorials to learn how to use it for your existing code base.

Try it out

Please don’t hesitate to give it a try and if you’re new to Azure, remember you can sign up for a free Azure account to get $200 free Azure credit and access to over 25 always free services (including Azure IoT Hub)! If you have any feedback, feel free to reach us at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-azure-iot-tools/issues. We will continuously improve our IoT developer experience to empower every IoT developers on the planet to achieve more!

The post Azure IoT Tools November Update: standalone simulator for Azure IoT Edge development and more! appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

What if the community of extension authors banded together to add powerful features to Visual Studio that made it easier to create extensions? What if those features could be delivered in individually released extensions, but joined by a single installation experience that allows the user to choose which of the features to install? That’s the idea behind Extensibility Essentials – an extension pack that ships community-recommended extensions for extension authors.

Extension authors are usually interested in improving their own tooling in Visual Studio – either by installing extensions created by others or by building some themselves. By banding together, we can create the best and most comprehensive tooling experience for extension authoring. So, let’s test that theory by creating a range of extensions published to the Marketplace under our own accounts, and reference them in Extensibility Essentials to provide a unified and simple installation experience.

The individual extensions can and probably should be single purpose in nature. This prevents feature-creep where additional features are added that may or may not be useful for extension authors. If additional features are not closely related to the extension, then simply create a new extension for them. That way it is up to the individual extension author to decide if they wish to install it. It is also crucial that the extensions follow all the best practices.

Once the individual extension is stable, it can be added to Extensibility Essentials.

The extension pack Extensibility Essentials doesn’t do anything by itself. It is a barebone extension pack that just references the individual extensions. When installing the extension pack, the user can choose which of the referenced extensions to install. At the time of this writing, there are 9 individual extensions.

How the individual extensions are listed before installing

Ideas for new extensions can be centralized to the GitHub issue tracker. By collecting ideas in a central location, it provides a single location to comment on and potentially design features ahead of implementation.

The issue tracker is for both bugs and suggested features

It would be cool if…

So next time you’re sitting in Visual Studio working on an extension, think about what feature you’d like that would make you more productive. If you can’t think of a feature, but feel there is a scenario that is particularly problematic, then open a bug on the GitHub issue tracker and let other people try to figure out how an extension could perhaps solve the issue.

Thinking “it would be cool if…” is the first step to make it possible and with the Extensibility Essentials, it might be closer to becoming reality than imagined.

Does this idea resonate with you? Let me know in the comments.

Mads Kristensen, Senior Program Manager @mkristensen Mads Kristensen is a senior program manager on the Visual Studio Extensibility team. He is passionate about extension authoring, and over the years, he’s written some of the most popular ones with millions of downloads.

In previous blog posts you have read about some of the ideas behind Q#, how it came into existence, and its development over the past year. You have read about quantum computing, quantum algorithms and what you can do with Q# today. With the end of the year approaching, there is only one more thing to cover: What is next?

This blog post is about our aspirations for the future and how you can help to accomplish them. It contains some of our visions going forward, and we would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

Community

One of the most exciting things about Q# for us is the growing community around it. Being rooted in the principles of quantum mechanics, quantum computing tends to have this air of unapproachability to the “uninitiated”. However, quantum computing builds on the notion of an idealized quantum system that behaves according to a handful of fairly easy to learn principles. With a little bit of acquired background in linear algebra, some persistence, and patience when wrapping your head around how measurements work it is possible to get knee-deep into quantum algorithms reasonably quickly!

Of course, a couple of good blog posts on some of these principles can help. We strive to actively support you in the adventure of exploring quantum algorithms by providing materials that help you get started, like our growing set of quantum katas. Our arsenal of open source libraries provides a large variety of building blocks to use in your quest of harnessing the power of quantum. One of the main benefits of open source projects is being able to share your work with all the people brave enough to explore the possibilities that quantum has to offer. Share your progress and help others build on your achievements! Whether in kata or library form, we welcome contributions of any size to our repositories. Let us know how we can help to make contributing easier.

Exchange among developers is one of the most important aspects of software development. It is omnipresent and vital to building a sustainable environment around a particular toolchain and topic. Thankfully, modern technology has made that exchange a lot easier than when the first computer programmers started their careers. We intend to make full use of the power of the internet and give a voice and a platform for discussions on topics related to Q# and quantum computing to developers around the world. The Q# dev blog is part of this effort. Contact us or comment below if you have an idea for a blog post or would like to hear more about a specific topic related to Q#. Establishing good feedback channels is always a challenging endeavor and in particular for a small team like ours. We would like this place to become a source of knowledge and exchange, a place where you can find the latest news and voice your take on them.

Growth

This brings us back to our plans for Q#. We have built Q# to make quantum development easier and more accessible. Of course, there were also a couple of other considerations that have played into that decision. For instance, we are anticipating the need to automate what is largely done in manual labor today, e.g. qubit layout and gate synthesis that are often still done on a case-by-case basis for each program and targeted hardware. When is the last time you worried about how error correction works on the hardware your code gets executed on? With qubits being an extremely scarce resource, and the long-term ambition to use quantum computing to address the most computationally intensive tasks that cannot be tackled with current hardware, the optimization of large-scale quantum programs needs to be a priority. We chose to develop our own language in order to have full control and flexibility over what information is represented how, and when it is used during compilation in order to be able to support a modular and scalable software architecture for executing quantum programs. But that’s a tale for another time. What is important is that these considerations are key factors in how we design and develop the language going forward.

A programming language is more than just a convenient set of tools for expressing an algorithm. It shapes the way that we think and reason about a problem, how we structure it and break it down into tasks when building a solution. A programming language can have a tremendous impact on our understanding of existing approaches, as well as how to adapt and combine them for our purposes. Particularly so when venturing into new territory.

Our goal is therefore to build a shared understanding of what it is we strive to accomplish, and to evolve Q# into the powerful language needed to drive progress in quantum programming. Our goal is to leverage the expertise of a community of language designers, compiler veterans, quantum physicists, algorithms and hardware experts, and a variety of software developers to shape a new kind of computing architecture. And we want you to be part of it.

Transparency

Since our 0.3 release at the beginning of November we have been eagerly working on not just the next release, but on defining and preparing the next steps in 2019. While we are in the middle of formulating our plans for the future, I want to give you a brief insight into some of our considerations.

As I am sure you have noticed, the support for data structures in Q# is minimal. While we do provide quite a few high-level language features for abstracting classical and quantum control flow, we intentionally omit some of the more object-oriented mechanisms such as classes. We anticipate remaining heavily focused on transformations that modify the quantum state, expressed as operations in Q#, as well as their characteristics and relations in the future. However, basic bundling of data and manipulations of such is of course an important aspect of many programs and we want to provide suitable mechanisms to express these in a way that allows to make abstractions, is convenient, and is resistant to coding errors. User defined types in the current setting have limited power besides an increased type safety. The “black box approach” to type parameterization currently restricts their usefulness; we do not provide a mechanism for dynamic reflection and it is not possible to apply operators or other type specific functionalities to argument items whose type is resolved for each call individually. In that sense, these items are “black boxes” that can merely be passed around. We want to do as much of the heavy lifting as possible statically in particular since debuggability of quantum devices is a huge challenge. There are several mechanisms one might consider alleviating the consequences of these decisions. On one hand, type constraints are a common mechanism used in several popular languages. In a sense, they can be seen as “specializations based on the properties of a type”. One could also pursue the stricter path of specializing based on the concrete type itself, de-facto adding a form of overloading that we currently explicitly prevent from being used. Either way, by clearly separating user defined types from tuples in the type system we have made a first step towards extending their power.

If you are curious to hear more about possible ideas for Q#, their benefits and caveats, or want to share some thoughts of your own, comment below! Contribute to the discussion and post your speculations to the question: What makes a quantum programming language “quantum”, i.e. what makes it particularly suited for quantum computing?

Join us

I hope you join us into a new year of pushing the boundaries of computation by participating in our coding competitions, contributing to our open source repositories, commenting on or writing blog posts and sharing your ideas and experiences!

How about a new year’s resolution of your own? Let us know what you expect to accomplish and how we can help you achieve your new year’s resolution around quantum programming in Q#!

Bettina Heim, Senior SDE, Quantum Software and Application @beheim Bettina Heim is a quantum physicist and software engineer working in the Quantum Architectures and Computation Group at Microsoft Research. She is responsible for the Q# compiler and part of the Q# language design team. Prior to joining Microsoft she worked on quantum algorithms, adiabatic quantum computing, discrete optimization problems, and the simulation and benchmarking of quantum computing devices.

What we’ve heard and experienced ourselves is that when building applications, you have a frictionless experience when your code editor and tools are integrated and seamless. Yet when developing IoT apps, you often need to manage connected devices and send test messages between the device and IoT Hub at the same time that you’re debugging and working on your code. You’ll likely spend time switching between windows or even screens to monitor the messaging and many components of your development.

To ensure that the tools you need are close at hand, we’ve updated the Cloud Explorer for Visual Studio extension for IoT developers to enable you to view your Azure IoT Hubs, inspect their properties, and perform other actions from within Visual Studio. Cloud Explorer is installed by default if you selected the Azure Workload when installing Visual Studio. To access the latest features, you need to upgrade to Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Update 9 or later, then download and install the latest extension from Visual Studio marketplace.

Here are some of the new features to help IoT developers easily interact with Azure IoT Hub, and the devices connected to it:

• Interact with Azure IoT Hub
  • Send D2C messages to IoT Hub
  • Monitor D2C messages sent to IoT Hub
  • Send C2D messages to device
  • Monitor C2D messages sent to device
  • Invoke Direct Method
  • View and update device twin
• Device management
  • List devices
  • Get device info
  • Create and delete devices
• IoT Edge development support
  • Create IoT Edge deployment for device
  • List modules
  • View and update module twin

To learn more about what the IoT Hub enables and how to use the latest, check out the IoT Hub documentation.

Easy to Set Up

After you’ve installed Cloud Explorer, you can open Cloud Explorer view from Visual Studio menu View → Cloud Explorer. Sign in to your Azure account by clicking the Account Management icon if you haven’t done this before.

Expand Your subscription → IoT Hubs → Your IoT Hub, the device list will be shown under your IoT Hub node. Select one IoT Hub or device to inspect its properties or perform actions against the resource.

Now you have learned how to access your Azure IoT Hub resources.

Try the Tutorials

If you want to discover the Cloud Explorer features further, we offer the following walkthroughs where you will perform common IoT Hub management actions. To explore advanced or specific IoT scenarios, head over to check out our IoT Hub documentation, where we’re always adding new projects and tutorials.

• Use Cloud Explorer for Visual Studio to send and receive messages between your device and IoT Hub

• Use Cloud Explorer for Visual Studio for Azure IoT Hub device management

Your feedback is also very important for us to keep improving and making it even easier to develop your IoT applications. Please share your thoughts with us by suggesting a feature or reporting an issue in our Developer Community

Chaoyi Yuan, Software Engineer Chaoyi is a software engineer working on IoT tools. He’s currently focus on providing great tools for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code users.

The second preview of Visual Studio 2019 is now available for download. This release contains a number of improvements and additions to the core experience and different development areas, many of which are a result of your direct feedback. As always, you can check out the release notes for more details or read on for the highlights.

Core IDE experience

Visual Studio 2019 will automatically download updates in the background while your computer is idle. This means you can continue using Visual Studio 2019 until it’s time to install. And, you will only need to wait for the actual installation of the update. The default will be set to “Download all, then install”, and you can modify this by going to Tools > Options > Environment > Product Updates.

In Preview 1, we introduced a new Per-Monitor Awareness (PMA) preview feature that is now enabled by default for users that meet the system requirements of .NET Framework 4.8 and Windows 10 April 2018 Update. Alongside the core IDE, multiple tool windows such as Toolbox, Breakpoints, Watch, Locals, Autos, and Call Stack should now render sharply across monitors with different display and scale configurations.

Search capabilities have improved in two places: the start window and inside the IDE. In the start window, you can now search for project templates by language, platform, and tags via the search box. Preview 2 introduces filters for menus, components, and templates during search in the IDE, as well as the capability to create and add new projects and items directly from the search box.

Based on your feedback, the new blue theme in Visual Studio 2019 has been updated by dialing down luminosity and increasing contrast. The draggable region has been improved as well by making the toolbar region also draggable. As a result, dragging the Visual Studio 2019 window should now be more natural.

The document health feature that was introduced with Preview 1 has been given a visual upgrade in Preview 2. Now, at a glance, you can see how many errors or warnings your document has, and clicking the control will bring up the error list. Code cleanup, which was introduced in Preview 1, has also been given its own control to quickly access the code cleanup features.

C++ development

C++ developers will notice quite a few improvements in this release. Check out the release notes for the full list, but here are some of the highlights:

• You now have access to a fresh version of the MSVC compiler and to libraries that:
  • Bring you guaranteed binary compatibility with Visual Studio 2017 MSVC toolset and runtime
  • Add initial support for C++ 20 standards (specifically the “spaceship” operator i.e. <=> under /std:latest),
  • Enable OpenMP 4 SIMD vectorization as well as many codegen improvements for better runtime performance and build throughput, including a new compiler switch -Ob3 that provides more aggressive inlining
  • Provide new Code Analysis checks including the new Lifetime profile checker.

• CMake integration now enables you to:
  • Detect and enable Vcpkg toolchains automatically for CMake projects
  • Take advantage of Just My Code debugging and Code Analysis editor integration in CMake projects

Plus, you can try out the latest C++ productivity improvements, including the newly-enhanced C++ Template IntelliSense, NULL->nullptr refactoring, quick fixes for missing #include and using namespace declaration, missing semicolons, and more.

C# development

Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 adds a couple more new C# 8.0 language features on top of the ones that shipped in Preview 1 (Take C# 8.0 for a spin). Most notably, C# 8.0 pattern matching now allows recursive patterns, which can dig into the structure of an object, and switch expressions, which are a lightweight expression version of switch statements. To learn more, check out Do more with patterns in C# 8.0 on the .NET Blog.

F# development

A preview of the F# 4.6 language is now available in Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2. You can learn more about the language changes in the F# 4.6 Preview blog post. Additionally, we’ve revamped how the F# language service is initialized by Roslyn, which should result in a consistently faster solution load time for larger solutions.

.NET development

Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 brings a range of new refactoring and codefix capabilities, such as sync namespace and folder name, pull members up, invert conditional expressions/logical operations, and many more. We’re also gradually rolling out new classification colors which are similar to Visual Studio Code. You can control these via Tools > Options > Environment > Preview Features.

Starting with this release, we are making project files for .NET SDK-style projects a first-class file type in Visual Studio and are supporting things like double-clicking a project node to open the project file and finding a project by name with Go To All (Ctrl + T). Additionally, .NET SDK-style projects will now use the new Integrated Console experience for F5 and Ctrl + F5 on console apps.

Code cleanup also now enables you to save collections of fixers as a profile. Now, if you wanted to apply a small set of targeted fixers frequently while you code and have another more comprehensive set of fixers to apply before preparing for a code review, you can configure profiles to address these different tasks.

Python development

You can now switch between different Python interpreters using the new Python Environments toolbar when editing Python files or working with projects or Open Folder workspaces.   Miniconda is available as an optional component during installation so you don’t have to separately install it to create conda environments. Additionally, you can now create Visual Studio Live Share sessions for collaboration on Python code. Check out the Python in Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 blog post for more details.

Web and container development

If you’re developing with Node.js, you will find JavaScript debugging support for unit tests in this release. If ASP.NET is more your style, you will find that when publishing your application to Azure App Service, you can associate Azure Store and Azure SQL resources with your app as dependencies.

If you’re using containers, Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 now supports debugging ASP.NET Core applications that use Alpine as a base image. There’s also support for the latest ASP.NET and .NET Core images.

Visual Studio Kubernetes Tools are now integrated in the Azure development workload for easy installation. This will add the Container Application for the Kubernetes project template to Visual Studio, which will automatically create a Dockerfile and Helm chart that you can use. This also enables you to add support for Kubernetes to an existing ASP.NET Core application by right-clicking the project and selecting Add > Container Orchestrator Support. After adding Kubernetes support, you can build, run, and debug your application in a live Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster with Azure Dev Spaces.

Mobile .NET development

For .NET developers using Xamarin to build mobile apps, Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 has improved build performance if you use Xamarin.Android 9.1.1 or higher. Xamarin.Android now also supports the latest Android dex compiler (d8) and code shrinker (r8). The Android designer now natively supports Android Pie (9.0) and will show you improved status when loading. You can also use Go-To-Definition (Ctrl + Click) on resource URLs to navigate to the file or line where they are defined.

A new property panel has been added for Xamarin.Forms developers, enabling you to edit common attributes for controls. The Xamarin.Forms templates now use the latest Xamarin.Forms 4.0 release and include a new Xamarin.Forms Shell app that aims to reduce the complexity of a multi-platform app solution.

Last, but not least, load performance for new projects has been improved dramatically, showing performance gains of up to 50% in certain cases. When building apps, you can now also see more detailed build progress information by clicking the background tasks icon in the bottom left of the IDE.

Get started; share feedback

You can download Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 here or update using the Visual Studio Installer. If you want to give it a spin without installing it, check out the Visual Studio images on Azure. Let us know of any issues you run into by using the Report a Problem tool in Visual Studio. You can also head over to the Visual Studio Developer Community to track your issues, suggest a feature, ask questions, and find answers from others. We use your feedback to continue to improve Visual Studio 2019, so thank you again on behalf of our entire team.

Angel Zhou Program Manager, Visual Studio Angel Zhou is a program manager on the Visual Studio release engineering team, which is responsible for making Visual Studio releases available to our customers around the world.

Are you inspecting many variables at once in the Locals window? Tired of constantly scrolling through the Watch window to locate the object you are currently interested in? New to Visual Studio 2019 for most languages (with some exclusions such as Xamarin, Unity, and SQL), you can now find your variables and their properties faster using the new search feature found in the Watch, Autos, and Locals windows!

With the new search feature, you will be able to highlight and navigate to specified values contained within the name, value, and type columns of each watch window.

Find your keywords faster using search and highlighting

If you are a fan of scrolling to the items you want, highlighting will allow you to find what you want easier. As you start typing in the search bar, the highlighting of matches currently expanded on screen will occur, giving you a faster alternative to performing a large-scale search.

Navigate between your specified keywords quickly

You can execute a search query using ENTER or the right and left arrow icons (“find next” (F3) and “find previous” (Shift+F3), respectively) shown below. If you are not a fan of scrolling to the items you want, clicking the arrows are also used to navigate through each found match. We based the search navigation on a depth first search model, meaning that matches are found by diving as far into the selected variable as specified before looking for matches within the next variable. You don’t have to sit through the full search if you don’t want to because search can also be cleared and canceled at any time, whether the search is ongoing or not.

Search for items deeply nested in your code

Unable to find what you’re looking for on your initial search? We’ve provided a “Search Depth” drop down to find matches nested X number of levels deep into your objects, where levels are defined similarly to levels in a tree data structure context. This option gives you the power to choose how thorough you want to search inside your objects (up to 10 levels), letting you decide how long or short the search process takes.

When you are searching for items that are already expanded and visible on your screen, these items will always be returned as matches no matter what search depth you have specified. Having to loop back to the item you want after passing it can be a pain, so setting the search depth to 1 will allow you to navigate to previous matches using the “find previous” arrow icon.

Excited to start searching in the Watch, Autos, and Locals windows? Let us know in the comments!

For any issues or suggestions, please let us know via Help > Send Feedback > Report a Problem in the IDE. If you have any additional feedback about this feature, feel free to complete this brief survey.

Leslie Richardson, Program Manager, Visual Studio Debugging & Diagnostics @lyrichardson01 Leslie is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Debugging and Diagnostics team, focusing primarily on improving the overall debugging experience and feature set.

We are excited to announce that, in our Visual Studio Enterprise 2019 preview, we are expanding Snapshot Debugger support beyond Azure App Services hosting ASP.NET Core and ASP.NET applications to now also include Azure Virtual Machines (VM), Azure Virtual Machine scale sets (VMSS), and Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)!

When Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise 15.5 became generally available, we introduced the Snapshot Debugger, an innovative diagnostic tool that enables you to quickly and accurately evaluate problems in their Azure production environments without stopping the process and with minimal performance impact.

When an unanticipated issue occurs in production, it can be difficult to replicate the exact conditions in your testing environment and almost impossible to do so on your local development machine. You might consider asking your DevOps team to “turn up” production logging but this relies on you having already anticipated where issues might occur prior to deployment. You may also request that a process dump be taken, but that requires perfect timing and some luck to capture the most important details, you also must gauge how your collection strategy might negatively imy pact performance.

The Snapshot Debugger provides a familiar and powerful debugging experience, allowing developers to set Snappoints and Logpoints in code, similar to debugger breakpoints and tracepoints. When a Snappoint is hit in your production environment, a snapshot is dynamically created without stopping the process. Developers can then attach to these snapshots using Visual Studio and see what’s going on with variables, Locals, Watches and Call Stack windows, all this while the live site continues to serve your customers.

Azure Virtual Machines/Azure Virtual Machine scale sets

For most PaaS scenarios, Azure App Service is more than capable of encapsulating a complete end-to-end experience. However, for developers and organizations that require greater control over of their platform and environment, VMs remain a critical option and Snapshot Debugger supports them in the latest preview of Visual Studio.

Once your VM/VMSS has been set up to host your ASP.NET or ASP.NET Core web application you can open your project in Visual Studio 2019, and click on the “Debug->Attach to Snapshot Debugger…” menu item, where you will now be able to select VM/VMSS as shown.

The UI experience remains almost identical but now you will be required to select an Azure Storage account to collect your snapshot logs and to share the snapshot collection plan (App Services will also require Azure Storage in Preview 2).

Selecting the “Install Remote Debugger Extension” option will prompt Visual Studio to install the extensions in Azure, which is necessary to view snapshots. This process also opens a specific set of ports (30398, 31398, 31399, 32398) to facilitate communication to your local machine, these ports are not required for retrieving and viewing logpoints.

Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

Azure provides an incredible cross platform experience and our debugging and diagnostics tools now provide feature parity in our Kubernetes service offerings.

Before attempting to use any of the Snapshot Debugger features in AKS it is vital that your Docker images include ASP.NET Core 2.2+ installed in a global location, as well as the correctly configured Snapshot Debugger and the requisite environment variables.

To help you enable support for Snapshot Debugger in AKS we have provided a repo containing a set of Dockerfiles that demonstrate the setup on Docker images. We support three variants of Linux (Debian, Alpine and Ubuntu) and they are organized according to the ASP.NET Core version, the OS platform, and the platform architecture.

For example, the ASP.NET Core 2.2 Debian 9 (Stretch) x64 Dockerfile is located at /2.2/stretch-slim/amd64/Dockerfile. This Dockerfile produces an image with Debian 9 x64 as the base with ASP.NET Core 2.2 Runtime, it includes the latest supported Snapshot Debugger backend package and sets the environment variables to load the debugger into your .NET Core application.

Try the preview

The latest Snapshot Debugger experiences are now in preview, download and try it out here.

This preview supports the following scenarios:

• Azure App Services on the Windows OS running ASP.NET Core (2.0+) or ASP.NET (4.6.1+).
• Virtual Machines on the Windows OS running ASP.NET Core (2.0+) or ASP.NET (4.6.1+).
• Azure Kubernetes Services (Linux Docker Containers) running ASP.NET Core (2.2+).

If you have any issues using Snapshot Debugger, please review this guide on Troubleshooting and known issues for snapshot debugging in Visual Studio.

We would love to hear your feedback. To report issues, use the Report a Problem tool in Visual Studio. You’ll be able to track your issues on the Visual Studio Developer Community site where you can also ask questions and find answers.

Mark Downie, Program Manager, Visual Studio Diagnostics @poppastring Mark is a program manager on the Visual Studio Diagnostics team, working on Snapshot Debugger.

If you are a web, mobile or games developer and would like to know how to become more productive and efficient using Visual Studio for Mac then we’ve got you covered. Visual Studio for Mac is a powerful IDE for C# developers that work with Xamarin, .NET Core and Unity workloads. The new video series, hosted on the Visual Studio Toolbox, contains short, roughly 5-minute, videos that cover tips and tricks for specific tasks and may even unveil features you didn’t even know existed! The first few videos will be introducing Visual Studio for Mac and what you can do with it.

You don’t want to miss a single video in the series so make sure you subscribe now. We will be recording and releasing a new video each week over the next few weeks, and the links will be updated on the date specified below. The videos currently feature Program Managers, Cody Beyer (@cl_beyer) and Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi (@SayedIHashimi). You can also provide feedback using the Developer Community portal

Here are the links to all the videos:

Tell us what you think!

We invite you to leave us a comment below and let us know what you think of the series. If these are helpful and valuable to our users, then we will record more videos and keep the series going. If there is another format that you think would be better, we would love to hear your thoughts.

Here are some useful links:

• Download Visual Studio for Mac
• Learn more about Visual Studio for Mac
• Report a problem, or suggestion, for Visual Studio for Mac

Cody Beyer, Program Manager @cl_beyerCody Beyer is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio for Mac team at Microsoft. His primary areas of focus cover overall performance and reliability of the IDE. He is also interested in computer ethics and privacy and aims to create software that empowers and respects everyone.

Sayed Hashimi, Senior Program Manager @sayedihashimiSayed Ibrahim Hashimi has a computer engineering degree from the University of Florida. He works at Microsoft as a Senior Program Manager creating better .NET Core, and ASP.NET Core, ­development tools in Visual Studio for Mac. Before joining the Visual Studio for Mac team, he worked on ASP.NET features in Visual Studio. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was a Microsoft Visual C# MVP. Sayed has written four book on MSBuild, http://msbuildbook.com and he is a co-founder of  the OmniSharp project.

Visual Studio 2019 now supports per-monitor DPI awareness (PMA) across the IDE. PMA support means the IDE and more importantly, the code you work on appears crisp in any monitor display scale factor and DPI configuration, including across multiple monitors.

Visual Studio 2019 (left) with system scaling vs Visual Studio 2019 (right) with the PMA option enabled.

If you have used Visual Studio across monitors with different scale factors or remoted into a machine with a different configuration than the host device, you might have noticed Visual Studio’s fonts and icons can become blurry and in some cases, even render content incorrectly. That’s because versions prior to Visual Studio 2019 were set to render as a system scaled application, rather than a per-monitor DPI aware application (PMA).

System scaled applications render accurately on the primary display as well as others in the same configuration but have visual regressions such as blurry fonts and images when rendering on displays with different configurations. When working for extended periods of time, these visual regressions can be a distraction or even a physical strain.

Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1 included the core platform support for per-monitor DPI awareness and Preview 2 includes additional fixes for usability issues around scaling, positioning and bounding (e.g. content renders within the bounds of tool windows). Preview 2 also adds several more popular tool windows that now correctly handle per-monitor DPI awareness.

How to enable PMA for Visual Studio 2019

The easiest way to try the new PMA functionality is on Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2. You’ll need to have the Windows 10 April 2018 Update or a newer build installed along with the latest version of .NET Framework 4.8. If you’re still running Preview 1 then you also need to enable “Optimize rendering for screens with different pixel densities” in the Preview Features node of the Tools -> Options dialog.

There are many features where you’ll start to see Visual Studio render clear fonts and crisp images. Here’s a few of the most used UI in Visual Studio where you should notice a difference.

• Core Shell
• Menus and context menus
• Most code editors
• Solution Explorer
• Team Explorer
• Toolbox
• Breakpoints
• Watch
• Locals
• Autos
• Call Stack

Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 also fixes some of the usability issues affecting UI positioning, scaling and content bounding that were discovered in Preview 1.

Our goal is to have per-monitor awareness working across the most used features by the time we ship Visual Studio 2019. In future updates, we’ll continue enabling PMA across more areas and look forward to your feedback.

Tell us what you think!

We thank you for your ongoing feedback, and encourage you to install the latest Visual Studio 2019 preview, enable the PMA functionality, and tell us about your experiences through the Developer Community portal. Please upvote PMA related asks or create new ones whenever you feel a specific component (tool window, dialog, etc.) or issue has not being reported.

Reporting your experience alongside your display configurations, PMA feature state (on/off) and for bonus points, any screenshot or video showing the affected areas will help us resolve issues faster, and account for as many use-cases as possible.

Ruben Rios, Program Manager, Visual Studio @rub8n Ruben is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio IDE platform team. During his time at Microsoft, he’s helped build tools and services for web & mobile devs in both Visual Studio and the Microsoft Edge F12 dev tools. Before joining Microsoft, he was a professional web developer and has always been passionate about UX.