Visual Studio 2022 17.11 now brings exciting advancements from GitHub Copilot! This release significantly improves how GitHub Copilot integrates into your development workflow, offering smarter and more intuitive coding assistance.

Discover the new GitHub Copilot features in Visual Studio, such as enhanced context understanding, improved code completions, and AI insights for debugging and naming. These updates aim to boost your productivity and efficiency in coding. To try these new features, download the update, make sure to activate your GitHub Copilot account and check out the release notes for more detailed information.

GitHub Copilot is getting smarter

GitHub Copilot Chat now enables you to reference your complete solution, which allows you to gain an even deeper, holistic understanding of your solution to get better results! To reference your solution, simply use @workspace, and Copilot will respond to high-level questions regarding your solution, files, and their interactions.

Additionally, GitHub Copilot Enterprise users in Visual Studio can now use @GitHub to get answers enriched with context from their entire repository and Bing search results.

Naming things made easy

GitHub Copilot can now generate naming suggestions for your C++ identifiers (variables, methods, or classes) based on how your identifier is being used and the style of your code.

To try it out, you’ll need an active GitHub Copilot subscription. Navigate to any variable you wish to rename, right-click -> Rename (Keyboard: Ctrl+R, Ctrl+R). You’ll notice a GitHub Copilot sparkle icon that you can click or toggle to generate naming suggestions.

AI-generated breakpoint expressions

AI-generated expressions for conditional breakpoints and tracepoints are now supported in C++. GitHub Copilot analyzes your code and offers insightful breakpoint expressions, streamlining your debugging process.

When you place the cursor in the condition text for a conditional breakpoint/tracepoint in the breakpoint settings window, GitHub Copilot will instantly generate AI-based expression suggestions tailored to your code. You can choose the condition that best suits your needs.

Understand your symbols with GitHub Copilot

We’ve integrated GitHub Copilot into the tooltip on hover over symbols to provide AI-generated summaries of the selected symbol. This is available for both C# and C++ developers.

This feature assists developers in understanding descriptions of various symbols at different invocations within their codebase. By hovering over a symbol and selecting the ‘Tell me more’ option, GitHub Copilot can generate documentation for the selected symbol.

Refine your GitHub Copilot suggestions

In Visual Studio 17.11, you can now refine code completions by adding context or asking questions without accepting them first. This update allows you to modify and retry GitHub Copilot’s suggestions before having to accept, saving you the hassle to accepting and refining again! Just press Alt+/ to modify, or if you’re happy with the suggestion, press tab to accept.

GitHub Copilot is even more secure

Introducing GitHub Copilot Content Exclusion, a new feature that allows admins to Copilot to ignore specific files in a repository or organization, ensuring sensitive information is protected while using AI for efficient coding. This applies to Completions, Inline, Chat, for GitHub Copilot for Business and Enterprise users. Additionally, exclusions also apply to other non-chat features, like rename suggestions and hover text. Additionally, content exclusion works with repos on platforms other than GitHub, including Azure DevOps.

We hope you enjoy this update to Visual Studio and all the new developments happening within GitHub Copilot, and we look forward to hearing what you think. You can share feedback with us by using the thumbs up or down within the Chat, via Developer Community, by reporting issues via report a problem and share your suggestions for new features or improvements to existing ones.

Stay connected with the Visual Studio team by following us on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn and on Microsoft Learn.

Thank you for using Visual Studio and happy coding!