Download websites that use Microsoft Visual Studio

About Microsoft Visual Studio

Detecting a development environment on a live website sounds like a category error, and explaining why it is not is the useful work of this page. Visual Studio does not run on a web server. What reaches the public internet are the traces it leaves in the files it produces, generator markers in markup, project and publish artefacts carried into the deployment, framework scaffolding and default file layouts created by the tooling that nobody edited afterwards.

Evidence of that kind describes the team, not the runtime. Visual Studio is Microsoft's development environment, first released in 1997 and Proprietary, and the centre of gravity for C# and the wider .NET world. A site carrying its fingerprints was very likely built by a Windows oriented shop, is likely to be hosted on Microsoft infrastructure, and is likely to sit alongside other Microsoft products inside the same organisation.

As of October 2026 we record the marker on 1,408 sites, and the number deserves more scepticism than most. Modern pipelines strip generator metadata, a large share of .NET sites are published without any of it, and a scaffolded file that survives all the way to production increasingly indicates an older or a manual deployment process. The visible population therefore skews old, skews small and skews toward sites deployed by hand rather than by a build server.

Skew is not a defect when you know it is there, and in this case it is arguably the product. For a vendor selling into the Microsoft ecosystem, whether that means hosting, licensing, cloud migration or .NET consulting, a list of sites still carrying hand deployed tooling artefacts is a list of organisations that have not modernised their delivery, which is exactly the conversation being sold. For a security researcher the leaked artefact is a finding by itself, since the deployment habit that leaves a generator tag in place also tends to leave configuration files and source maps where they should not be.

Inspecting one domain tells you what a single site leaked. The dataset answers the question that matters commercially, which is how widespread the habit still is, which countries and hosting providers concentrate it, and which of those organisations also run the neighbouring Microsoft products you sell around.