Mark Downie

Principal Program Manager, Visual Studio

Mark Downie is a program manager on the Visual Studio Production Diagnostics team. He blogs about how you can use Visual Studio to get to the bottom of gnarly issues in production.

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Easily navigate code delegates while debugging

June 18th, 2024
Delegates are everywhere in modern code; a delegate is a type that represents references to methods with a particular parameter list and return type. Developers use delegates to pass methods as arguments to other methods. One example you may be familiar with is with event handlers. Handlers are methods you can invoke through delegates. ...

Developing cloud-native apps with .NET Aspire and Visual Studio

May 23rd, 2024
We're excited to introduce the general availability of .NET Aspire, a comprehensive stack aimed at simplifying the way .NET cloud-native apps are built and managed. .NET Aspire offers developers like you an improved, opinionated framework for constructing distributed applications, ensuring a seamless and consistent development experience. ...

Visual Studio 2022 17.10 and GitHub Copilot: Your Coding Partner for Faster and Smarter Development

May 21st, 2024
Today, as we kick off the //BUILD 2024 conference, we're thrilled to share the general availability of Visual Studio 2022 17.10! This release features a new, single GitHub Copilot extension, marking a significant leap forward in AI-assisted development by embedding the power of advanced AI directly into strategic parts of your Integrated ...

Introducing Visual Studio 17.10 – Preview 2 is Here!

March 12th, 2024
We hope you all enjoyed the new and updated features that came with our first preview of Visual Studio 17.10, and now we have even more to share! This release brings additional tools to help you improve your code reviews with Copilot, diagnostics improvements, as well as additional Extensibility and WinForms enhancements. Browse this list ...

Introducing Visual Studio 17.10 – Preview 1 is Here!

February 14th, 2024
We're excited to introduce the first preview of Visual Studio 17.10! This is where we get to show you what we've been working on and what we’re planning, and with feedback from the most active developer community on the planet, we get to deliver truly compelling products. During this release you’ll get to check out our latest ...

Simplified Code Refinement and Debugging with GitHub Copilot Chat

August 22nd, 2023
This March, we announced GitHub Copilot chat for Visual Studio 2022. With Chat, Copilot has moved beyond code completions, offering in-depth analysis and explanations of how code works. It supports the generation of unit tests, and even helps with proposed fixes to bugs, and explaining exceptions. By gathering useful context data from Visual ...

Debugging Encoded Text

January 11th, 2023
Validating encoded strings is a basic but important part of our debugging workflow these days. I cannot count the number of times I have found myself looking at a URL-encoded string only to be suddenly unsure how percentage signs are supposed to be represented? I have been a web developer for years, but I can never remember what the URL-...

Arm64 Visual Studio is officially here!

November 8th, 2022
We are happy to announce the first fully supported Arm64 version of Visual Studio that will natively run, allowing building, and debugging Arm64 apps on Arm-based processors. 17.4 GA delivers a native Arm64 experience for Visual Studio that eliminates the need for emulation in most developer workflows. While the improved x64 emulator helps ...

Arm64 Visual Studio

June 14th, 2022
We are excited to announce that the release of Visual Studio 2022 17.3 Preview 2 is now available as a native Arm64 application on Windows 11! This will be the first version of Visual Studio that will natively support building and debugging Arm64 apps on Arm-based processors. Our key goal with this preview is to introduce and stabilize the ...

Managed Memory Dump Analyzers

April 16th, 2021
With the release of Visual Studio 2019 16.9 you can try out our new managed memory dump analyzers to help you root cause the issues that plague your applications in production. We're excited for you to give it a try!