Not every question deserves the same amount of thought. Renaming a variable isn’t the same as debugging a memory leak, and they don’t need the same level of thinking. So why should your model treat them the same way every time? Starting in Visual Studio 18.9 Insiders 2, it doesn’t have to. Supported models now come with a thinking […] The post Tell your model when to think harder appeared first on…
There's a new Agent (Preview) in Copilot Chat, built on the same GitHub Copilot SDK that powers the GitHub Copilot CLI, that gets more done with less back-and-forth. The post Visual Studio July Update — Meet the New Agent, Powered by the GitHub Copilot SDK appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.
Organizations are increasingly looking for greater control over extensions within development environments. Driven by security, compliance, and internal governance requirements, teams want more visibility into how developers discover and acquire extensions. To address these needs, we’re excited to begin previewing Private Marketplace support in Visual Studio. Private Marketplace for Visual Studio…
You open the model picker, scroll past a dozen options, and pause. How are these models different? Which one should you actually use? And once you’re a few hundred messages deep, how much capacity is even left before things start dropping off? We’ve all been there. These are the kinds of questions Visual Studio now […] The post Pick, manage, and get the most from your models appeared first on Visu…
Visual Studio now includes built-in Agent Skills, created by experts from the .NET and Azure teams, to help you better customize your agentic workflow and complete development tasks more efficiently, starting with the 18.8 Release. Agent Skills are reusable capabilities that enable your agent to perform structured tasks more reliably (to learn more about what […] The post Built-in Agent Skills Bri…
One of the best parts of a Visual Studio Subscription is discovering benefits that can make your day-to-day development work easier and more cost effective. One benefit that deserves more attention is Azure Dev/Test pricing. In fact, it’s one of the most valuable benefits included with a Visual Studio Subscription. If you’re building cloud applications, testing new ideas, or maintaining multiple d…
The June update includes a Copilot Usage window refresh with proactive alerts as you approach your limits, MCP servers now get a trust check before they run anything new. The post Visual Studio June Update – Track Your Usage, Trust Your Tools appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.
If you’re building and maintaining Visual Studio extensions, you’ve probably ended up with some sort of build and publishing workflow – whether it’s manual, scripted, or stitched together over time. This post is for extension authors who want a simple, repeatable way to build, version, and publish their VSIX files using GitHub Actions. I’m going […] The post Automating your Visual Studio extension…
Themes are personal. Some of us live in dark mode, some swear by high contrast, and some of us have very strong opinions about that one shade of blue from years ago. The new themes in Visual Studio 2026 are built on Fluent, which gives us a much more consistent and accessible foundation, but we […] The post Make Visual Studio look the way you want appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.
Pull request integration in Visual Studio has been one of the most requested Git features. Developers have been asking for a way to open a PR, inspect the changes, discuss feedback, and finish the review without switching to the browser. The feedback on that request has played a big role in shaping this experience over […] The post Review pull requests without leaving Visual Studio appeared first…
Microsoft Build kicks off today in San Francisco, June 2 and 3. If you cannot make it in person, the sessions are streaming online for free, and I want to walk you through what we are announcing for Visual Studio this week. One idea tie most of it together. Code is an asset, not just […] The post What’s Coming Next in Visual Studio: Our Microsoft Build 2026 Announcements appeared first on Visual S…
There’s a particular rhythm to good development work: you think, you try, you check, you adjust. This month’s Visual Studio update leans into that rhythm. Whether you’re sketching an approach with the Plan agent before touching a single file, reviewing a wave of changes across many files, or fine-tuning the context Copilot has to work […] The post Visual Studio May Update – Plan, Review, Refine ap…
You ask Copilot to tackle something big, it gets to work, and a dozen file changes later you realize you had a completely different approach in mind. The code isn’t wrong… it just isn’t what you were going for. Last year, we introduced planning as a feature in Agent mode to help with exactly this. […] The post Plan Before You Build: Introducing the Plan agent in Visual Studio appeared first on Vis…
If you lead a development team, you already know the pattern. You approve the travel, your developers attend a great conference, they come back energized, and then the work resumes exactly as it was. The ideas don’t survive contact with the backlog. This July at VSLive! @ Microsoft HQ in Redmond, we’re trying to change […] The post VSLive! Microsoft AI Hackathon 2026: Send Your Team Home With Work…
Visual Studio now supports Agent Skills, which are reusable instruction sets that teach Copilot agents how to handle specific tasks like running a build pipeline, generating boilerplate, or following your team’s coding standards. Define a skill once, and the agent applies it automatically whenever it’s relevant. Creating a skill You can create a skill directly […] The post Agent Skills in Visual S…
TypeScript 7 Beta Now Enabled by Default in Visual Studio 2026 18.6 Insiders 3 In Visual Studio 2026 18.6 Insiders 3 we have updated the built-in TypeScript SDK to TypeScript 7 Beta (native preview). The TypeScript SDK provides the compiler and language service used for TypeScript and JavaScript support in Visual Studio. This update impacts any […] The post TypeScript 7 Beta Now Enabled by Default…