GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2022

Mads Kristensen

GitHub Copilot uses OpenAI Codex to suggest code and entire functions in real-time right from your editor. Trained on billions of lines of public code, GitHub Copilot turns natural language prompts including comments and method names into coding suggestions across dozens of languages. In Visual Studio, Copilot acts as a pair-programmer making it more joyous to code – and increases your productivity at the same time.

And an updated version of Copilot for Visual Studio was just released. It contains a lot of fixes, tweaks, and other improvements. Check out this demo video:

Together with the built-in AI in Visual Studio called IntelliCode, your AI programming partners elevate your coding to the next level. IntelliCode and Copilot complement each other and use lots of the same underlying AI/ML technology and APIs.

To get started with GitHub Copilot, make sure you are on version 17.4 or later of Visual Studio 2022. Then check out this step-by-step guide. Copilot is free for GitHub verified students and maintainers of popular open-source projects. Learn more about billing for Copilot.

This is the first blog post in a series about AI in Visual Studio, so stay tuned for more about GitHub Copilot and IntelliCode and how they can improve your coding and team productivity.

16 comments

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  • MgSam 7

    I don’t really understand why you guys are charging separately for this feature. It should be included for paid versions of Visual Studio. VS is one of the only IDEs that charges money to use it- seems a little silly to pay not once but twice to use some of its features.

    Also you said “IntelliCode and Copilot complement each other” but didn’t really explain how. Why would I want this given IntelliCode is now shipped out of the box?

    • Thomas VAILLIER 11

      I agree, Copilot should be included in Visual Studio subscriptions

    • Mads KristensenMicrosoft employee 3

      GitHub Copilot is a pay-for service, no matter what editor or IDE you are using. You get 60 days free trial so you can try it for free.

      Regarding the details on how IntelliCode and Copilot complement each other, stay tuned for more blog posts about this soon.

    • Aaron YimMicrosoft employee 1

      @MgSam, Aaron from IntelliCode team here. We’ll soon have a blogpost about how the two work together.

      The key difference is that Copilot is much more powerful in its ability to suggest up to a whole function of code at once.

      • Ben Gardiner 2

        Sorry Aaron, is there any chance your team is going to bring the quality of service from VsCode to Visual Studio?
        Right now as a paid product the VS version is borderline useless (not meaning to be rude just very honest) – often making no suggestion at all – or suggestions that aren’t even relevant.
        My personal experience would be the VsCode version is 8/10 and VS 1/10 which is a real shame.
        I can see there are many many devs suffering the same experience right now and as a paid product (as mentioned above) we deserve better

    • Nigel Hewitt 5

      Copilot is somebody taking the opportunity to charge you for something they get for free by sweeping Github.
      While I am very happy to provide my pubic github content to other coders for free that does not include providing it to somebody charging for it even if it is not directly copied just mined for training their AI.

      • Aaron Shumaker 4

        Yeh it’s unfortunate they are taking advantage of the tiny percent of dedicated programmers who contribute to open source projects, whom for the vast majority do not make any revenue or anywhere close to what their hours would be worth in a paid position. It’s heart breaking to see our IP being taken advantage of in this way. Public code does not equal take my code and sell it through the obfuscation of a trained AI in order to generate derivative works and resell it under an incompatible licensing scheme. Microsoft is taking hard work, and leveraging it to create a product they solely profit from. Terms of Service allows your public repos to be used to improve GitHub products, but I would say there’s clear evidence that copilot is generating derivative works and essentially redistributing code under incompatible licenses to the users of copilot. Microsoft is taking liberties here. Copilot is a great idea, but has been executed in a very exploitative way. At least Youtube compensates people who create the content that has made their platform successful.

      • Bingham, Bob C. 1

        There’s plenty of code on GitHub that is licensed for commercial use. I wonder if their training is watching those licenses?

      • Lexen Informática 1

        You can see it as paying someone, in this case something, to look for what you want without having to waste time looking for it yourself.

  • Lucas Baran 1

    Does copilot now support windows on ARM chips like the surface pro 9?

    • Aaron YimMicrosoft employee 1

      Hi Lucas,

      We don’t have any updates at the moment about ARM support for Copilot in VS.

  • Bingham, Bob C. 6

    Is the code you are typing evaluated on your own machine or on servers somewhere? If our code is being sent up to servers, secure or not, that’s likely to be a big problem for some development situations.

  • Philip Lewis 0

    riped me off GitHub Philip Lewis fathertime2021@outlook.com

  • Robert Kaev 6

    As the solution for Copilot is great. Does it mean that only can be used fully when hosting repos in GitHub and using GitHub actions ? Is the integration with Azure DevOps services planned as well.

  • Thomas Heijtink 7

    Since there is a copilot for Github and for Office 365. When is the integration of Copilot planned for Azure DevOps? Especially pull requests for bug spotting and comment and description generation?

    Thanks!

  • Francois Malassenet 0

    Is there a link that will work on the git hub blog/repo that does reference Visual Studio as all the documentation is for IntelliJ ? Looks like the common pattern at Microsoft to botch execution?

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