• We improved solution load performance by optimizing design time build.
• We've added installation progress details on Visual Studio Installer.
• You can pause your installation and resume at a later time.
• We streamlined the update process so the notification takes you directly to the Installer.
• Non-administrators can create a VS layout.
• We added a new shortcut for Edit.Duplicate in the keyboard mapping.
• We made significant improvements to the F# language and tools, particularly for .NET Core SDK projects.
• The C++ compiler optimizes your code to run faster through improved optimizations.
• C++ Mapfile generation overhead is reduced in full linking scenarios.
• Debug options are available for Embedded ARM GCC support.
• We added strong name signing on CoreCLR for the C# compiler.
• Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin has lots of new productivity updates for iOS and Android developers.
• Python no longer requires a completion DB, and Anaconda users have support for conda.
• The Performance Profiler's CPU Usage Tool can display logical call stacks for asynchronous code.
• The CPU Usage tool displays source line highlighting and async/await code with logical 'Call Stack Stitching'.
• The debugger supports thread names set via SetThreadDescription APIs in dump debugging.
• Snapshot Debugging can be started from the Debug Target dropdown for ASP.NET applications.
• We've launched the initial implementation of Navigate to decompiled sources for .NET code navigation.
• New enhancements for Configure Continuous Delivery include support for TFVC, Git authentication over SSH, and containerized projects.
• You can now click on the Continuous Delivery tile in Team Explorer to configure automated build and deployments for your application.
• Team Explorer supports Git tags and checking out pull request branches.
• Service Fabric Tooling for the 6.1 Service Fabric release is now available.
• The Windows 10 Insider Preview SDK can be installed as an optional component.
• File versions for a number of Visual Studio executables now reflect the minor release.
• Test Explorer has a hierarchy view and real time test discovery is now on by default.
• We have added support for testing Win10 IoT Core applications.
• Visual Studio Build Tools supports TypeScript and Node.js.
• ClickOnce Tools support signing application and deployment manifests with CNG certificate.
• You can access Azure resources such as Key Vault using your Visual Studio accounts. 

If you write copious amounts of CSS, a pre-processor can greatly decrease your stress levels and save you a lot of precious time. Using tools such as Sass, Less, Stylus or PostCSS makes large and complicated stylesheets clearer to understand and easier to maintain. Thanks to features like variables, functions and mixins the code becomes more organized, allowing developers to work quicker and make less mistakes. 

• Entity Framework 7 RC1 (which we used here), is slow, but later builds are faster. It’s still not going to top any chart, but it’s currently faster than EF6, according to tests with a local build. We’ll update the benchmark with results from RC2 when it’s released.  

Protocol Buffers are a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications protocols, data storage, and more, originally designed at Google (see).

protobuf.js is a pure JavaScript implementation with TypeScript support for node.js and the browser. It's easy to use, blazingly fast and works out of the box with .proto files! 

In this article we are going to learn how to authenticate with Office 365 credentials in C#.

C# Language Features by Versions
This page contains all the features introduced to C# with a link to all the proposals and documentation.
This is a great way to find out if you are missing out on new features that can make your developer life easier. 

We are looking to learn more about your experience with NuGet.org to understand how we can make it better. This survey will take about 5 minutes of your time. Sharing your feedback here gives you an opportunity to help us prioritize the next set of investments and influence the direction of NuGet.  

Today, we are releasing an update to .NET 8.0.400 SDK due to an issue with (MSBuild Crash when publishing containers)[dotnet/sdk#42731].

The .NET 8.0.401 release is available for download. This SDK includes the previously released .NET 8.0.8 Runtime and is in support of Visual Studio 17.11 release. The latest 8.0 release is always listed at .NET 8.0 Releases.

webpack is arguably the most popular bundler right now and this is the first major release in over two years. We get big improvements to caching (and therefore performance), reduced bundle sizes with better tree shaking, and a variety of breaking changes to prepare for the future (automatic Node polyfills are gone, for one).