Showing archive results for 2026

If you've been looking for a practical way to build Azure skills, Cloud Academy (a QA company) gives Visual Studio subscribers hands-on learning that fits into busy schedules.  Whether you're new to Azure, expanding your cloud expertise, working towards certifications or preparing for more advanced projects, this benefit helps you learn by d...

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 effort control...

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.

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 ...

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 makes a little easier to answe...

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...

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 ...

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.

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 go...

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 have heard from plenty of you who want more control ov...