Microsoft Developer Blogs

Slow builds are a consistent theme of feedback from C++ developers. We built GitHub Copilot build performance for Windows so you can leverage Copilot to optimize your project’s build times. This workflow will find optimizations that bring your build times down. At first, we only measured the impact of build optimizations on full clean builds. While that number is valuable, we know that you are not rebuilding from scratch on most days.

Imagine a catalog of 50,000 visual assets—characters, environments, props—and no way to search them except scrolling. Someone asks: “Find me all the night scenes with a warrior holding a weapon.” Without structured metadata, that search is impossible. Manual tagging does not scale. We needed a way to automatically extract rich, structured metadata from images—and critically, to trust the output enough to put it in a production search index.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of unified manifest support for Word, Excel, PowerPoint Add-ins, in addition to Outlook Add-ins. Unified manifest support first launched for Outlook Add-ins. Now, it extends across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, making it possible to build a single app that works across Microsoft 365 apps. This update helps developers deliver a more consistent experience for users and gives IT admins a simpler deployment model.

Pure Virtual C++ 2026 streams Tuesday, July 21, 2026 at 9:00 AM PT, a free, one-day virtual conference for the whole C++ community, live on YouTube (Microsoft Reactor) and Twitch, with on-demand recordings on the Visual Studio YouTube channel afterward. Register now → This is the third and final post in our Meet the Speakers series. We’ve covered building and running faster and the AI-native developer workflow.

Perhaps you have seen SET NOCOUNT ON; at the beginning of a stored procedure and wondered why it is there. By default, SQL Server uses SET NOCOUNT OFF;, which sends messages such as “(10 rows affected)” after each statement. Using SET NOCOUNT ON; suppresses those messages. If an update changes 10 rows, with row-count messages enabled: SET NOCOUNT OFF; SQL Server sends: (10 rows affected) And with row-count messages suppressed: SET NOCOUNT ON; SQL Server sends no row-count message.

We’ve built a new course to help you navigate the journey when you’re the owner of an application built on a legacy .NET framework and it needs to be modernized. The whole concept of modernization is overwhelming! Security updates aren’t being issued any longer! Dependencies are out of date because they’re not being updated! You’re not alone. We have a suite of tools to help you modernize and this course helps you use those tools.

Recently, a customer building servers with the Azure Functions Model Context Protocol (MCP) extension reached out and asked: How do I handle tools that take longer than the client is willing to wait? This becomes especially relevant when tool calls move beyond simple request/response into multi-step workflows and long-running operations. At the same time, MCP is evolving to address exactly this.

Organizations are increasingly looking for greater control over extensions within development environments. Driven by security, compliance, and internal governance requirements, teams want more visibility into how developers discover and acquire extensions. To address these needs, we’re excited to begin previewing Private Marketplace support in Visual Studio.

The MSVC Build Tools Preview is updated regularly with the latest features and fixes from the MSVC development team. This post covers updates from the past month, currently targeting the v14.52 release. This encompasses changes across the compiler frontend, backend, linker, standard library, and related tools.

The MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.44 continues to improve the SQL development experience with features that help you work faster and customize your workflow. In this release, we’re introducing the Public Preview of Shortcuts Configuration and an Enhanced Results Grid experience. Together, these updates make it easier to personalize how you work with SQL and improve the performance and usability of query results directly inside Visual Studio Code.