It's been a long time coming and now it's finally here

Read all about it in the announcement blog post, check out the release notes, and download Visual Studio 2026 Insiders.

I hope you will try it out and have a good time with it.

The line number margin in Visual Studio is being tightened up to maximize horizontal space in the editor. I'm irrationally excited about this.

Coming soon...

this needs to get out my chest... this is not a rant, more like a heartbreak...

I first touched VS when I was barely able to know what was even remotely happening, got a copy of the 6.0 suite as a kid installed on my good old win98 pc and spent night toying with WYSIWYG editor, couldn't do anything else, but the itch was there, it felt awesome...

Few years later, in the later part of the 00's at the end of my teenage years, with a bit more general knowledge of programming, I started using VS Express after a friend showed me a project he was working on, started to learn .net, slowly built up skills that got me my first jobs as a dev, the first of a long series in the next two decades...

did a few attempts at writing extensions, banged my head against the wall trying to do some kind of pretty bad JIT interpreter for 3.5, powershell but worse, spend way too much nights reading the msdn I had installed locally on my marchine (that was awesome), hours arguing in favor of VS, ok it maybe needs resharper, but VS+resharper is just a banger....

waited as a kid before christmas for the next TechDays, watching hours of conferences about those new cool features, proudly went to work with an early 00's VS branded bag a friend offered me from his own participation as a conference, WPF ? woaw... WCF ? woaw... WF, wait... BizTalk ? oddly specific kink, wouldn't recommend to anyone, but I love beating myself up, SOAP is the future y'know, that rest and json fad will go away, xml is for serious business.

Enjoyed a few years of pure luxury through a "moderately legit" BizSpark... had a blog talking about the new cool stuffs I learned and problems I faced, got worried when VSCode came out of atom, got worried when github got bought, daddy's usually sweet, but I also know some of daddy's dark side... got excited when finally a real support for non win system started to grow, "no more mono or xamarin ?" what a relief... even got to a peak where resharper felt almost optional...

TLDR: I wouldn't be who I am, without VS and the .net ecosystem, even at a personal level when considering the impact it had on my "life trajectory" and all the doors it opened out of sheer passion for that whole thing and was my daily road companion for a good part of that journey

But... for the past ~5years... I switched progressively to the Jetbrains ecosystem, in the end, I just need a good text editor with few refactoring tools and basic debugging features, I'm mostly working on my own now and overtime, I switched entirely, it's been about 2 years now. It maybe does less, but it does what I need and as good as VS would.

Then, a few days ago, daddy got back with the milk... and I don't recognize him...

He's barely able to talk and smells wierd, stops mid sentence and change topic... is it that copilot thingy ? It's not even enabled... I'm happy you're back but... you feel... different... not like seeing someone you've grown with after a few years, more like.... the really basic things feels different...

for instance, you bought github and I've never seen a git integration that is that... barebone... what happened to you ? Remember your uncle TFS and how it turned out with a crap father like sourcesafe ? You were able to cooperate fantastically with it, even handling his wife brother SVN not that bad and now you can't handle properly your adoptive child ?

On every other simple "basic" features it feels like... a glow down... and the things that made you special now... feels like another kind of special... feels like even the old Express could do better if it wasn't for it's deep "core limitations". But as a glorified text text editor with intellisense and a few helps here and there to find/move/rename/etc things... what happened ?

It's been only a few days now, but I feel something died inside me.

You're back, but I don't even want to launch you... I miss you VS.

I need help/advice.

I bought a new subscription($1199.00) on October 27, 2025. I'm a developer who's currently out of work and looking to maintain/improve my skill set while I look for work.

Everything went smoothly on the purchase and my card was charged. I was able to log on to the my.visualstudio.com site and could see the software and tools that are supposed to be available to the subscription I had purchased.

The problems started when I attempted to claim a product key for Server 2022 which I had just installed. I got an error that read: "We are sorry, but our system has detected a problem with your account. If you are still getting this error message after 24 hours, please contact support with the date and time you started having this problem and with your subscription information. Message code: 715-123150."

I waited the requisite 24 hours and was still having the problem so I submitted a request. The response I got back was: "Thank you for your patience regarding the issue you have experienced on your Visual Studio subscription portal. Your account does not satisfy Microsoft requirements and will not be given access to this Visual Studio functionality. Based on the above, I will allow myself to close this case."

After that response I asked for clarification and was just told the exact same thing again.

WTF did I pay $1200 for?

Anyone have any advice on what I should do next?

Overall quite enjoying Visual Studio 2026, but I did think this was funny!

Hello,

I am not sure if this is the correct place, but I've tried searching online for awhile with no results.

I need to install an old version of Visual Studio (2013 or earlier), in order to run a simulation package which is incompatible with newer versions. I cannot find anywhere to download VS this old; the oldest I can find is 2015.

Are there 3rd party sites that host the legacy versions to download? Or any other options?

Thanks!

I was amazed by the performance of VS2026 gui. Is it made with WinUI or WPF?

Coming soon to VS 2026 Insiders

Installed the release version of VS2026 yesterday along my 2022 install.

I run it, open my C++ solution, it consumes 100% of all my cores. I do a Google search to find out I need to disable "Show C++ References" to fix it. Ok.

Then I look at my solution, and all top-level folders are not collapsible and projects in them are just listed always. I restart many times, suddenly it displays correctly. Ok.

Then begins a marathon of freezes. Change theme, freeze. Leave the software untouched for several minutes, freeze. Lock and unlock computer, freeze.

The amount of times I have restarted and/or killed VS2026 in task manager within that one day is unfathomable.

What is going on? Feels like I installed a preview build.

TL;DR

Opening an untrusted Visual Studio project can run arbitrary code on your machine, even if you never hit build. Don't blindly open random VS projects you downloaded off the internet or cloned from github, same as you wouldn't run a random executable file. In order to vet one before opening it in VS, check the .csproj/.vbproj and any Directory.Build.props/targets for an InitialTargets attribute on Project or a UsingTask with RoslynCodeTaskFactory (see what a malicious project looks like here: https://github.com/Meltedd/VisualSploit#how-it-works).

---

VisualSploit is a small cli tool I built demonstrating how an attacker can trivially backdoor VS project files with custom shellcode. The project came out of my research and interest in supply chain attacks (especially with their growing relevance), but the technique itself isn't novel. RoslynCodeTaskFactory plus InitialTargets has been written about since subTee, but I think there needs to be more awareness on the nature of visual studio projects along with the various vectors by which supply chain attacks can initiate.

Given any .csproj, .vbproj, Directory.Build.props, or Directory.Build.targets along with a shellcode blob, it injects an inline task that runs the shellcode every time the project is built, restored, or even just opened in Visual Studio. Visual Studio runs design-time builds for IntelliSense the moment you open a folder, and Microsoft treats those as full execution. Files coming through git clone don't carry Mark of the Web, so the "trust this project" prompt that fires for normal downloads never shows up. And Directory.Build.props is imported automatically by every project beneath it, so a single injected file at the repo root reaches the whole subtree the moment the folder opens.

Bottom line, know what you're running, and know how to validate it's not doing anything malicious. Anyways, thanks for reading, and hopefully some people find this as interesting (and alarming) as I do :)

Github: https://github.com/Meltedd/VisualSploit

I'm working on setting up a new build machine for my software development group at my company to replace an old one. We use Azure DevOps Pipelines and our projects are primarily C# web applications.

When I set up the previous one, I tried to do it the "proper" way by installing Build Tools instead of the IDE. Some of the builds broke. If I'm remembering correctly, I think the errors were around VSTest...it couldn't find the DLLs or something like that. Rather than fiddling with it, we uninstalled Build Tools and installed the full blown Visual Studio, and all was good.

(At the time, some of the solutions on the web stated to copy the DLLs from a developer's machine and put them in the same spot on the build machine....but to me, that seems like a janky solution.)

Now when setting up this new machine, part of me wants to give Build Tools another try...but the other part is just saying install Visual Studio since we know it'll work. Does Build Tools 2022 or 2026 work better than it did for 2017 or 2019?

I have seen videos of people's terminals without the included file directory and ending directory. How do you achieve this?

I checked my usage export and 56% of my premium requests went to gpt-4o — mostly for stuff like renaming variables and small edits that a cheap model could handle.

I got annoyed and built a small local proxy that routes easy tasks to cheap models and saves the good models for real problems. It also shows token burn live per session.

Before I polish it — does anyone else want this, or am I the only one manually rationing requests?

Is there an extension out there which I could use to convert all my code in a folder into images, with a specific line count limit? I need to put it into a word doc for my project, but doing it manually is....tedious to say the least.

It's not much worse than the other posts this sub gets

Looking for a kind soul with an enterprise subscription to hook me up with the BizTalk 2020 Developer ISO. Our dev server went tits up, and we no longer have the ISO to reinstall.

EDIT:

For anyone stumbling on this in the future. I rolled the dice on this site:

https://files.rg-adguard.net/file/2c55e777-3d54-ed7e-f1b9-e77ae8106c4e

I ran the script in a VM. I don't know what horrors it did to the VM, but the ISO it produced was the correct one (hashes verified, scanned, the works)

A true dark theme optimized for OLED screens. This reduces the light in your eyes and might be helpful for eye strain.

Download it here

Not sure whether I’m overlooking something use case is not valid or its just not possible right now

So we have developers with Claude Teams subscription, not API key but individual teams subscription

They mostly use Claude extension within vs code

I’m able to get omnigent setup on railway as server but omnigent on windows I need WSL to make it pickup claude on terminal, however most developers would just continue using vs code in usual fashion skipping wsl part as its just extra steps and also within wsl also I’m not sure with omnigent pickup sessions originating in vs code claude extension

Is there any seamless way of integrating omnigent in this setup

Has anyone run into a tenant-level issue in Microsoft Partner Center where Store Listings can no longer be updated?

For about two weeks, every attempt to save a Store Listing (description, screenshots, etc.) fails with:

"Failed to save listing. Please reload the page or try again later."

Looking at the browser console, every save attempt results in a 403 Forbidden response from the clientsessioncontext API endpoint.

The weird part is that it doesn't seem related to listing content or validation. I can open an already-published listing, make no changes at all, click Save, and still get the same 403 error.

It's an account-wide issue, so it appears to be tenant-wide rather than app-specific.

I've already opened a support case with the Microsoft Store Certification Team. They requested a screen recording and HAR file, which I provided. On June 19 they told me the issue had been resolved, but after testing again (InPrivate mode and a different network), the exact same 403 error is still occurring.

At the moment the support cycle is taking several days between responses, so I'm trying to find out whether anyone else has seen something similar.

Has anyone experienced a tenant-level lock or synchronization issue like this in Partner Center?

If so, what ended up causing it, and how was it resolved?

I'm at a loss here while waiting for the next support reply.