Visual Studio 2019 pushes the boundaries of individual and team productivity. We hope that you will find these new capabilities compelling and start your upgrade to Visual Studio 2019 soon.

As you are considering this upgrade, rest assured that Visual Studio 2019 makes it distinctively easy to move your codebase from previous versions of Visual Studio. This post captures the reasons why your upgrade to Visual Studio 2019 will be pain-free.

• You can install the latest IDE side-by-side with any older VS versions
• You can continue building your C++ code with the MSVC v140 (VS 2015.3) or v141 (VS 2017) toolsets
• You can upgrade to the latest MSVC v142 (VS 2019) and maintain binary compatibility with any of your 3rd party libraries that haven’t migrated yet
• Regardless of the toolset you’re on, you get access to the full collection of OSS libraries available in Vcpkg

As 2018 has come to an end, now is the time to look towards the future. We typically look out 6 to 12 months and establish topics we want to work on.

As we go we learn and our assessment of some of the topics listed changes. Thus, we may add or drop topics as we go.

We describe some initiatives as «investigations» which means our goal in the next few months is to better understand the problem and potential solutions before scheduling actual feature work. Once an investigation is done, we will update our plan, either deferring the initiative or committing to it.

As always, we will listen to your feedback and adapt our plans if needed.

We’re excited to announce starting today you can try the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 by installing Windows build 18917 in the Insider Fast ring! In this blog post we’ll cover how to get started, the new wsl.exe commands, and some important tips. Full documentation about WSL 2 is available on our docs page.

Microsoft’s Quantum team is excited to announce the Q# Coding Contest – Winter 2019! In this contest you can put your quantum programming skills to the test, solving quantum computing tasks in Q#. Winners will receive a Microsoft Quantum T-shirt!

Quantum computing is a radically different computing paradigm compared to classical computing. Indeed, it is so different that some tasks that are believed to be classically intractable (such as factoring integers or simulating physical systems) can be performed efficiently on a quantum computer. In 2017 Microsoft introduced the Quantum Development Kit which includes the Q# programming language. Q# can be used with Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code or the command line, on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

This post was written by Lena Hall, a Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft.

F# Software Foundation has recently announced their new initiative — Applied F# Challenge! We encourage you to participate and send your submissions about F# on Azure through the participation form.

Applied F# Challenge is a new initiative to encourage in-depth educational submissions to reveal more of the interesting, unique, and advanced applications of F#.

Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 is out! And with it, a couple more C# 8.0 features are ready for you to try. It’s mostly about pattern matching, though I’ll touch on a few other news and changes at the end.

Alexandr Epaneshnikov, a 19-year-old Russian student who is legally blind, recently decided he wanted to be more independent by commuting on his own and relying less on his mom for rides to school. It meant taking a streetcar to a subway to his high school in Moscow, a 30-minute trip that Epaneshnikov assuredly navigates with a cane and Moovit, an urban mobility app optimized for screen readers.

Blazor 0.9.0 is now available! This release updates Blazor with the Razor Components improvements in .NET Core 3.0 Preview 3.

New Razor Component improvements now available to Blazor apps:

• Improved event handling
• Forms & validation

We are beyond excited to announce Windows Terminal! Windows Terminal is a new, modern, fast, efficient, powerful, and productive terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, and WSL.

Windows Terminal will be delivered via the Microsoft Store in Windows 10 and will be updated regularly, ensuring you are always up to date and able to enjoy the newest features and latest improvements with minimum effort.

ML.NET is an open-source and cross-platform machine learning framework (Windows, Linux, macOS) for .NET developers. Using ML.NET, developers can leverage their existing tools and skillsets to develop and infuse custom AI into their applications by creating custom machine learning models for common scenarios like Sentiment Analysis, Recommendation, Image Classification and more!.

Today we’re announcing the ML.NET 1.0 RC (Release Candidate) (version 1.0.0-preview) which is the last preview release before releasing the final ML.NET 1.0 RTM in 2019 Q2 calendar year.

Soon we will be ending the first main milestone of a great journey in the open that started on May 2018 when releasing ML.NET 0.1 as open source. Since then we’ve been releasing monthly, 12 preview releases so far, as shown in the roadmap below:

In this release (ML.NET 1.0 RC) we have initially concluded our main API changes. For the next sprint we are focusing on improving documentation and samples and addressing major critical issues if needed.

The goal is to avoid any new breaking changes moving forward.

Create your first intelligent bot with Microsoft AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating the digital transformation for every industry, with examples spanning manufacturing, retail, finance, healthcare, and many others. At this rate, every industry will be able to use AI to amplify human ingenuity. In this e-book, Anand Raman and Wee Hyong Tok from Microsoft provide a comprehensive roadmap for developers to build their first AI-infused application.

Using a Conference Buddy as an example, you’ll learn the key ingredients needed to develop an intelligent chatbot that helps conference participants interact with speakers. This e-book provides a gentle introduction to the tools, infrastructure, and services on the Microsoft AI Platform, and teaches you how to create powerful, intelligent applications.

We love our .NET community that is filled with amazing developers writing fantastic blogs, libraries, presentations, and pull requests every week. We are always looking for ways to highlight this amazing work, and for over 4 years the ASP.NET team here at Microsoft has been hosting their ASP.NET Community Standups live on YouTube and now Twitch.

During the stream, they show off the latest and greatest community contributions along with all of the great open source work that the teams have been doing. As the .NET community expands so should the community standups, which is why we are pleased to introduce the expansion of their community standups that we officially call the “.NET Community Standup” series. These community standups span multiple teams and products in the world of .NET and show off the amazing work the community is doing.

Last week, Microsoft held its Build 2019 conference at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. Build is a large event with several thousand people from around the world attending to learn all about the current, newest, and future developer-oriented tech coming from Microsoft.

We had the pleasure of meeting so many of you at our booth and answering all your questions!

Inspiration sometimes arrives in strange ways. Here is the story of how a dirty disposable diaper led to the development of an artificial intelligence (AI) solution to help rid the world’s coasts of massive amounts of waste and garbage.

Some days ago we announced improved Razor tooling support in Visual Studio Code with the latest C# extension. This latest release includes improved Razor diagnostics and support for tag helpers and Blazor apps.