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
Roadmap for AI in Visual Studio (February)
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: Planning Agent First steps toward a dedicated agent for multi-step task planning and execution. Copilot SDK & Platform Integration (Experimental) We’re also beginning early work to better integrate the Copilot CLI into Vis...
Performance improvements to MEF-based editor productivity extensions
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 Studio extensions for developers. Previously, handling threads in VSSDK-based extensions was often difficult, requiring knowledge of thread affinity and even the ins and outs of COM just to avoid freezing Visual Studio. The new extensibility model abstracts these techni...
Visual Studio January Update — Enhanced Editor Experience
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 are now colorized with syntax highlighting to help you quickly parse suggested code between variables, functions, and other elements! To try out this experience, go to Tools > Options > Text Editor > Code Completions and check "Use colorized text for code comple...
Copilot Memories
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 everyone’s always on the same page! How Copilot memories make teamwork effortless Introducing Copilot memories, a new feature that empowers every developer and team to capture, remember, and share their coding preferences and important project guidelines, automatical...
Welcome to 2026, A Growth Year for All of Us
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. What surprised me wasn’t just the pace at which those sessions went live, it was what happened next. During the holidays alone, those sessions were viewed nearly 30,000 times. That tells me two things. First, learning doesn’t stop just because the calendar does. Seco...
How AI fixed my procrastination
I struggled to get started. For ages, I kept putting off building this website, creating a new programming language for Visual Studio, and coming up with fresh color themes. Each project looked overwhelming, and I couldn’t find the time or motivation to jump in. It all just felt like too much at once. But when a national holiday gave me a long weekend, I grabbed the chance to try out Copilot in Visual Studio and see how far I could get. To my surprise, I knocked out all three projects way faster and more easily than I expected. I’m sharing what I learned because I hope it inspires you to finally tackle those p...
Debugging, but Without the Drama (A Visual Studio 2026 Story)
It starts the way these things always start. A red build. A failing test. And that quiet, sinking feeling of “This worked yesterday.” Meet Sam. Sam’s not a junior, not a rockstar, just a solid developer who’s shipped enough code to know that bugs don’t care how confident you feel on Monday morning. That test failure does not offer much help at all. There are no clear steps to reproduce the issue. The exception message seems familiar in a vague way. But it does not prove useful right then. Out of habit Sam hits F5. He notices something small yet pretty important about it. The debugger launches fa...
Behind the scenes of the Visual Studio feedback system
Here on the Visual Studio team, our top priority is making your coding experience smoother and more enjoyable. And that begins with truly listening to your feedback. We understand that sometimes sharing your thoughts can feel like tossing bug reports and suggestions into a black hole. It doesn’t feel good, and we get it. But here’s the good news: over the past year, we’ve resolved more bugs reported by users and delivered more requested features than at any other time in Visual Studio’s history. We believe in being open about what happens to your feedback, so in this post, we’ll pull back the curtain and show ...
Streamlining your Git workflow with Visual Studio 2026
You’re a .NET developer with a busy morning, and an Azure DevOps ticket drops: “Login endpoint 500s under load.” You’ve got to fix it, review a teammate’s feature branch, and keep your repo clean - all before lunch. Visual Studio’s Git tools turn this everyday Git workflow of creating topic branches, stashing changes, committing, and handling PRs into a smooth, fast process. Let’s walk through your morning, showing how Visual Studio keeps Git friction out of your way. 9:00 AM: Spin up a topic branch for your bug fix Your repo’s open in VS (View → Git Repository), and you’re on main, fresh from last night’s C...