Microsoft Visual Studio is a powerful integrated development environment (IDE) for Microsoft Windows, providing comprehensive facilities to programmers for software development. It is used to view and edit code, and then debug, build, and publish apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such as Windows API, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Store and Microsoft Silverlight. It is thoughtfully designed, has a huge feature set, and supports a wide range of languages. It comes with built-in language support for C, C++ and C++/CLI, Visual Basic .NET, C#, and F#.

Microsoft also provides a free version of Visual Studio called the Community Edition.