Dev Blogs
At Pure Virtual C++ 2026, we build a C++ console app from an empty folder using CMake, MSVC, and GitHub Copilot CLI. This walkthrough shows a practical prompt sequence for dependency selection, reproducible builds, and controlled updates.
Slow builds are a consistent theme of feedback from C++ developers. We built GitHub Copilot build performance for Windows so you can leverage Copilot to optimize your project’s build times. This workflow will find optimizations that bring your build times down. At first, we only measured the impact of build optimizations on full clean builds. Wh...
GitHub Copilot modernization for C++ is out of preview as of Visual Studio 2026, helping you upgrade your MSVC Build Tools with an AI-guided workflow.
MSVC Build Tools v14.51 GA available in Visual Studio 2026 18.6
We recently brought C++ code understanding tools to GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio and VS Code. These tools provide precise, semantic understanding of your C++ code to GitHub Copilot using the same IntelliSense engine that powers code navigation in the IDE. Until now, these capabilities have been tied to GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio and VS Code...
C++ code navigation and build system tooling play an important role in the developer inner-loop. Code navigation tooling provides a precise, semantic understanding of your codebase, while build system tooling helps you express build configurations and variants for reproducible builds. In the VS Code ecosystem, these powerful capabilities are availa...
With the launch of Visual Studio 2026, we announced a Private Preview of GitHub Copilot app modernization for C++, which reduces the cost of adopting the latest version of the MSVC Build Tools. We used the feedback we received from our many Private Preview participants to make improvements that benefit all our users. After receiving feedback, we ad...
In November, we introduced C++ code editing tools for GitHub Copilot as a Private Preview, focusing on partnering with customers to tackle one of the common, taxing challenges for C++ development: refactoring at scale. Since then, we've listened to feedback and refined our tooling to make wide-sweeping C++ edits easier. "With C++ code editing tool...
Refactoring a C++ codebase can often require tracking updates across various sections of multiple files to ensure accuracy and relevancy. Historically, developers have relied on manual searches across a codebase and refactoring tools to perform these types of edits. However, with GitHub Copilot agents, developers can now delegate these complex...
A few problems have reared their heads at every company where I’ve worked on C++ as a Software Engineer over the past 20 years. For the most part, those problems have nothing to do with the language and how it is used, but instead all the “other” stuff, like dealing with long build times, getting consistent build environments, and managing the ...