Application Development
Use existing skills to create applications across multiple platforms
Visual Studio is a comprehensive collection of tools and services for developing applications that target the desktop, the web, devices, and the cloud. Whether you are creating your first Windows Store app, or building a website to support the latest browsers, you can leverage your existing skills with Visual Studio’s state-of-the-art development environment for .NET languages, HTML/JavaScript, and C++. For teams working across multiple platforms, Visual Studio provides a flexible collaboration environment for that welcomes connection with other development tools, such as Eclipse and Xcode.
Windows
Create premium consumer experiences, or modernize your business applications with a comprehensive solution that will help you design, code, debug, optimize, test and instrument Windows desktop, Windows Store, and Windows Phone apps. Its rich collection of tools for targeting Windows platforms equips you to create immersive applications that get the most of every Windows device using existing skills in languages such as C#, VB, C++, and JavaScript.
Universal Windows Apps in Visual Studio | Windows Dev Center | Sharing Code across Platforms with Visual Studio 2015 | WPF
Web and Cloud
Visual Studio provides you the flexibility to create applications that run on premises, or in the cloud. Easily transition applications and skills to Microsoft Azure, or build hybrid applications that get the best of both worlds for your customers’ needs. With Visual Studio’s integrated web tooling – including full support for HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and jQuery – enables the creation of modern, interactive web apps and services that adapt to traditional, modern, and mobile browsers. Features such as Browser Link and Page Inspector greatly simplify the creation of client and server web apps that run and look the same across almost any browser.
Web Development in Visual Studio | ASP.NET: Visual Studio features for Web Developers | ASP.NET | Python Tools for Visual Studio
- Video: What’s New for Azure Developers (Azure SDK 2.5 & Visual Studio Releases)
- Video: ASP.NET 5 Preview
Line-of-business applications
With the .NET platform, Visual Studio offers a comprehensive and flexible solution for efficiently creating powerful, scalable business applications and extending them across devices and the cloud. Visual Studio also helps you create custom collaboration and productivity solutions based on Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office. In addition, Office 365 Cloud Business Apps enable you to build upon the rich platform capabilities of Office 365 and Microsoft Azure.
Cross-platform development
If your team is developing software for different platforms and uses a variety of developer tools, such as Eclipse and Xcode, the entire development team can still take advantage of a single, unified and flexible collaboration environment with Application Lifecycle Management services in Visual Studio Team Services or Team Foundation Server. Both your HTML5 and native cross platform applications can take advantage of a single backend set of services or virtual machines hosted in Microsoft Azure. Visual Studio’s global partner ecosystem also provides a wealth of additional cross-platform capabilities, such as Xamarin for building native applications on Android and iOS devices reusing your .NET code and skills, and fully integrated with Visual Studio.
Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (Preview) | Visual C++ for Cross-Platform Mobile Development (Preview) | Visual Studio Emulator for Android (Preview) | Xamarin | Visual Studio Tools for Unity