Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Visual Studio 2026 is here: faster, smarter, and a hit with early adopters
Dear developers, We’re thrilled to announce that Visual Studio 2026 is now generally available! This is a moment we’ve built side by side with you. Your feed...
Latest posts
Tell your model when to think harderÂ
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, so you can dial up the reasoning when a problem is genuinely hard and dial it back down when it isn't. It's a small knob with a big payoff: better-matched answers, and more control over how many credits you spend getting them. A dial, not a switch Thinking effort is...
Visual Studio July Update — Meet the New Agent, Powered by the GitHub Copilot SDK
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.
Visual Studio Administrator? Join our Private Marketplace Preview!
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 For organizations familiar with Private Marketplace in VS Code, Private Marketplace in Visual Studio provides a similar curated extension acquisition experience while preserving the familiar Visual Studio workfl...
Pick, manage, and get the most from your models
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 answer. Here's a closer look at how you can see, compare, and get more from the models you already have. A model picker that works the way you do The model picker presents a long list of models you’ve needed to scroll through every single time. Starting in 18.9 Insider...
Built-in Agent Skills Bring .NET and Azure Expertise into Visual Studio
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 are Agent Skills, see this previous post). We’ve heard that getting started with skills can feel unclear, especially when deciding which ones to use and how to apply them. To simplify this experience, we’ve introduced a set of built-in skills for common ....
The Visual Studio Dev/Test Benefit: Freedom to Build, Test, and Experiment in Azure
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 development environments, cloud costs can sometimes influence how often you experiment or how closely your development environment matches production. Azure Dev/Test pricing helps remove that barrier by giving eli...
Visual Studio June Update – Track Your Usage, Trust Your Tools
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.
Automating your Visual Studio extension builds with GitHub Actions
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 to show how I do this across my own extensions. I’ve been using this approach for a long time, and over time I pulled the most repetitive pieces into a few small reusable actions, so I don’t have to keep rewriting the same logic in every repo. Those are: ...
Make Visual Studio look the way you want
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 over specific colors. Accent colors, hover states, the line between the shell and the tab headers… the small things that make an IDE feel like yours. So, we did something about it. Visual Studio now has a new Theme colors options page that lets you customize any...