• Performance improvements in the core debugger
• Support for  .NET 6 , which can be used to build web, client and mobile apps by both Windows and Mac developers, as well as improved support for developing Azure apps
• An update UI meant to reduce complexity and which will add integration with Accessibility Insights. Microsoft plans to update the icons and add support for  Cascadia Code , a new fixed-width font for better readability
• Support for C++ 20 tooling. language standardization and Intellisense
• Integration of text chat into the  Live Share  collaboration feature
• Additional support for Git and GitHub
• Improved code search  

.NET Core, the reinvention of the Microsoft .NET Framework as an open source, cross-platform development choice, is a key focus of the upcoming features planned for the Visual Studio IDE.

In conjunction with .NET Standard -- a spec detailing what .NET APIs should be available on all .NET implementations -- .NET Core retains compatibility with .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono while letting developers use Windows, macOS or Linux machines to code for mobile, cloud and embedded/IoT projects.

While still primarily driven by Microsoft dev teams, .NET Core is hosted on a GitHub repository and is supported by the .NET Foundation, an independent organization created by Microsoft three years ago to improve its open source development and collaboration.

Peeking at the Visual Studio Roadmap (updated last week) reveals .NET Core figures prominently in upcoming functionality for the IDE, both in the near-term and long:  

Visual Studio is a powerful IDE, but its focus didn’t align with some languages, PHP being one of them. As time progressed more languages found their way to Visual Studio, like Python and eventually PHP. 

We're pleased to announce the release of Python Tools 2.2.6 for Visual Studio 2015

Bogus is a simple fake data generator for .NET languages like C#, F# and VB.NET. Bogus is fundamentally a C# port of faker.js and inspired by FluentValidation's syntax sugar. 

Reloadium adds hot reloading also called "edit and continue" functionality to any Python application.

Python 3.9.0 is now available, and you can already test 3.10.0a1!  

MockHttp is a testing layer for Microsoft's HttpClient library. It allows stubbed responses to be configured for matched HTTP requests and can be used to test your application's service layer. 

var mockHttp = new MockHttpMessageHandler();

// Setup a respond for the user api (including a wildcard in the URL)
mockHttp.When("http://localhost/api/user/*")
        .Respond("application/json", "{'name' : 'Test McGee'}"); // Respond with JSON

// Inject the handler or client into your application code
var client = mockHttp.ToHttpClient();

var response = await client.GetAsync("http://localhost/api/user/1234");
// or without async: var response = client.GetAsync("http://localhost/api/user/1234").Result;

var json = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();

// No network connection required
Console.Write(json); // {'name' : 'Test McGee'}