Showing archive results for 2026

Get the Inside Scoop on Visual Studio Subscriptions, Straight to Your Inbox  A few weeks ago I was talking with a Visual Studio Enterprise subscriber. Seasoned .NET developer. Ships production code. Knows his stack inside and out.  During the conversation I mentioned one of the training benefits included in his subscription.  He stoppe...

When I first found Visual Studio Dev Essentials, it felt like discovering a hidden door in the developer toolkit world. I’d heard about free tools and cloud credits, but I wasn’t sure if it would really matter in day-to-day coding life. The short answer: it absolutely does.  What struck me most was how the program was built with real developers ...

This month’s Visual Studio update continues our focus on helping you move faster and stay in flow, with practical improvements across AI assistance, debugging, testing, and modernization. Building on the momentum from January’s editor updates, the February release brings smarter diagnostics and targeted support for real world development scenarios,...

Agents in Visual Studio now go beyond a single general-purpose assistant. We're shipping a set of curated preset agents that tap into deep IDE capabilities; debugging, profiling, testing alongside a framework for building your own custom agents tailored to how your team works. Built in agents Each preset agent is designed around a specific develo...

Refactoring at scale is a time-consuming and error-prone process for developers. In large codebases, developers have relied on manual searches and incremental edits across multiple files to accomplish these tasks. Modern development workflows depend on fast and accurate code navigation to avoid these pitfalls. When developers refactor existing c...

After a busy January (catch up here), we're shifting focus to reliability and refinement. This month is about tightening core workflows, improving agent stability, and building on the MCP foundations we've been laying. Agent Mode & Coding Agents Reliability is the priority this month. We're raising the floor on agent-driven scenarios with...

If you use editor productivity extensions for Visual Studio 2026, there's good news—they can now load faster! Extension developers with existing MEF-based editor productivity extensions should read this blog to learn about recent changes and how they might be affected.  We introduced VisualStudio.Extensibility to simplify the creation of Visual ...

Productivity Improvements This month, we are bringing you a series of small yet long requested and popular features to let you better control and customize your editor. These features are currently only available in the Insiders channel and will be available in Release soon. Colorized Code Completions Code completions a...

Are you wasting time reviewing code for nits on code standards, project preferences, or important contribution guidelines? We know the pain. It’s all too easy for best practices and those tiny but critical team details to slip through the cracks, resulting in inconsistencies, confusion, and wasted time. But now, there’s a smarter way to ensure ever...

I always enjoy the quiet stretch between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s one of the few moments in the year when things slow down just enough to reflect on what actually resonated. While many of us were unplugging, our digital team was doing the opposite, editing and publishing 19 sessions from VS Live! Orlando to the Visual Studio YouTube channel....