It's no secret I dig WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and now that WSL2 is available in Windows Insiders Slow it's a great time to really explore the options that are available. What I'm finding is so interesting about WSL and how it relates to the Windows system around it is how you can cleanly move data between worlds. This isn't an experience you can easily have with full virtual machines, and it speaks to the tight integration of Linux and Windows.

Look at all this cool stuff you can do when you mix your peanut butter and chocolate!

In a previous Remote SSH blog post, we went over how to set up a Linux virtual machine and connect to the VM using the Remote — SSH extension in Visual Studio Code. In this blog post, we'll go into some tips and tricks that you can use to get the most out of your remote setup.

With October release of the Python extension, we’re excited to announce the support of native editing of Jupyter notebooks inside Visual Studio Code! You can now directly edit .ipynb files and get the interactivity of Jupyter notebooks with all of the power of VS Code.

You can manage source control, open multiple files, and leverage productivity features like IntelliSense, Git integration, and multi-file management, offering a brand-new way for data scientists and developers to experiment and work with data efficiently. You can try out this experience today by downloading the latest version of the Python extension and creating/opening a Jupyter Notebook inside VS Code.



Since the initial release of our data science experience in VS Code, one of the top features that users have requested has been a more notebook-like layout to edit their Jupyter notebooks inside VS Code. In the rest of this post we’ll take a look at the new capabilities this offers.

We are pleased to announce that the October 2019 release of the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code is now available. You can download the Python extension from the Marketplace, or install it directly from the extension gallery in Visual Studio Code. If you already have the Python extension installed, you can also get the latest update by restarting Visual Studio Code. You can learn more about  Python support in Visual Studio Code in the documentation.  

In this release we addressed 97 issues, including native editing of Jupyter Notebooks, a button to run a Python file in the terminal, and linting and import improvements with the Python Language Server. The full list of enhancements is listed in our changelog. 

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.3 comes with many new features as summarized in this blog post. While the entirety of this release was greatly influenced by your feedback, having the ability to manage packages at the solution level was one of the capabilities that most of you expressed as lacking in Visual Studio for Mac. A new solution-level NuGet Package Manager is one of the exciting new features of Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.3.

We’ve made improvements to help you discover packages more easily. This includes an improved experience while searching for new packages, gaining an understanding of what packages are already installed in your project, and finding packages that have updates available. In this blog post, we will focus on the package management experience for a Solution. However, most of the experiences including installing, updating, and viewing installed packages have a similar new experience at the project-level, too.

To launch the NuGet Package Manager for a Solution, you can go to the context menu for the Solution and select «Manage NuGet Package…»:

Over the past year, the Visual Studio for Mac team updated the editors within the IDE to be faster, more fluent and more productive. We did this by building a macOS-native editor interface on top of the same editor backend as Visual Studio on Windows. In version 8.1 we introduced the new C# editor. This was followed by the new XAML editor in 8.2. And most recently, we updated our web languages to utilize the new editors in version 8.3, completing the process we set out to do a year ago. To celebrate this accomplishment, I wanted to share a bit of detail regarding the design and implementation of the new editors along with my five favorite new features in the Visual Studio for Mac code editors.

At the core of the updated editors within Visual Studio for Mac is the shared language service with Visual Studio on Windows. What this means is that the same backend that powers the Windows version of Visual Studio now powers the macOS version as well. This includes IntelliSense, Roslyn, text logic, and all the language services behind the scenes. The only portion not shared between Windows and macOS is the UI layer, which stays native for each platform. In the case of macOS, that means using macOS frameworks like Cocoa and CoreText to power the UI experience. By using a native UI, while also being able to utilize support for native input methods as well as support for right-to-left languages, font ligatures and other advanced graphical features.

Hello, everyone. Today we have another Microsoft project on the check. By the title of this article, you can guess that this time developers didn't «please» us with a large number of errors. We hope the project's authors won't be offended by the title. After all, a small number of errors is great, isn't it? However, we still managed to find something intriguing in the Azure PowerShell code. We suggest getting to know the features of this project and checking out errors, found using the PVS-Studio C# analyzer.

We are pleased to announce that the September 2019 release of the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code is now available. You can download the Python extension from the Marketplace, or install it directly from the extension gallery in Visual Studio Code. If you already have the Python extension installed, you can also get the latest update by restarting Visual Studio Code. You can learn more about  Python support in Visual Studio Code in the documentation.

This was a short release where we closed 35 issues, including improvements to the Python Language Server and to Jupyter Notebook cell debugging, as well as detection of virtual environment creation. The full list of enhancements is listed in our changelog. 

We are committed to building Visual Studio App Center for you. Thanks to you taking the time to request features via our Github repo, we are excited to announce that dark theme is available in App Center.

In the next few screens, you can get an idea of how App Center’s dark theme looks:


App Center Distribute in Dark theme


App Center Test in Dark theme

Have you ever needed to debug or profile an executable (.exe file) that you don’t have source for or can’t build? Then the least known Visual Studio project type, the EXE project, is for you!

In Visual Studio you can open any EXE as a ‘project’. Just go to File->Open->Project/Solution and browse to the .exe file. Like you would if it was a .sln file. Visual Studio will then open that EXE as a project. This feature has been around for a long time. It works on all currently supported Visual Studio versions and the docs for it are at  ‘Debug an app that isn’t part of a Visual Studio solution‘.

 

Cascadia Code is finally here! You can install it directly from the GitHub repository’s releases page or automatically receive it in the next update of Windows Terminal.

Wait, what’s Cascadia Code?

Cascadia Code was announced this past May at Microsoft’s Build event. It is the latest monospaced font shipped from Microsoft and provides a fresh experience for command line experiences and code editors. Cascadia Code was developed hand-in-hand with the new Windows Terminal application. This font is most recommended to be used with terminal applications and text editors such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

Building on the momentum from the recently announced Developer PowerShell, we are excited to share the first preview of the new Visual Studio terminal. This new preview experience is part of Visual Studio version 16.3 Preview 3.


 
Rather than build everything from scratch, the Visual Studio terminal shares most of its core with the Windows Terminal. For you, that translates into a more robust terminal experience, and faster adoption of new functionality.

I hope that you will find Node version 12 new capabilities compelling and soon you will upgrade your app to it.

In turn, you will get advanced debugging, intelligent coding with the powerful IntelliSense engine, interactive window, quick tracking of performance issues, unit testing, typescript integration, source control, cloud integration, and npm integration.

To get started in this walkthrough, this post captures the steps on how to update Node.js in Visual Studio, Windows/macOS, and NPM.

This article is the story how we once decided to improve our internal SelfTester tool that we apply to test the quality of the PVS-Studio analyzer. The improvement was simple and seemed to be useful, but got us into some troubles. Later it turned out that we'd better gave up the idea.

We like to search for errors in Microsoft projects. Why? It's simple: their projects are usually easy to check (you can work in Visual Studio environment for which PVS-Studio has a convenient plugin) and they contain few errors. That's why the usual work algorithm is as follows: find and download an open source project from MS; check it; choose interesting errors; make sure there are few of them; write an article without forgetting to praise the developers. Great! Win-win-win: it took a little time, the bosses are glad to see new materials in the blog, and karma is fine. But this time «something went wrong». Let's see what we have found in the source code of Windows Forms and whether we should speak highly of Microsoft this time.

In this article, I'm going to tell you about PVS-Studio, an analyzer for C and C++ code, and show you how to use it in the Visual C++ environment. This guide is specifically intended for beginner users.

PVS-Studio is a tool for detecting software bugs and potential vulnerabilities in the source code of software written in C, C++, C#, and Java. The analyzer runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Today at Xamarin Developer Summit, we announced XAML Hot Reload for Xamarin.Forms, which enables you to make changes to your XAML UI and see them reflected live, without requiring another build and deploy.

XAML Hot Reload for Xamarin.Forms speeds up your development and makes it easier to build, experiment, and iterate on your user interface. And this means that you no longer have to rebuild your app each time you tweak your UI – it instantly shows you your changes in your running app!

When your application is compiled using XAML Hot Reload, it works with all libraries and third-party controls. It will be available for iOS and Android in Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 2019 for Mac. This works on all valid deployment targets, including simulators, emulators, and physical devices.

XAML Hot Reload will be available later in 2019, but you can sign up to to participate in the preview phase:

Sign Up for the Preview Now

Great Visual Studio extensions share a few key features that sets them apart from the rest. They look and feel well crafted, are performant and reliable, do what they advertise to perfection, and blend in naturally among Visual Studio’s own features.

To make it easier to write great extensions, we’ve worked with the extensibility community to come up with a simple checklist to follow. There’s even a GitHub issue template you can use so you remember to go through the checklist.

Roslyn, the .NET compiler platform, helps you catch bugs even before you run your code. One example is Roslyn’s spellcheck analyzer that is built into Visual Studio. Let’s say you are creating a static method and misspelled the word static as statc. You will be able to see this spelling error before you run your code because Roslyn can produce warnings in your code as you type even before you’ve finished the line. In other words, you don’t have to build your code to find out that you made a mistake.



Roslyn analyzers can also surface an automatic code fix through the Visual Studio light bulb icon that allows you to fix your code immediately.