Visual Studio Blog
The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
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Agent mode is now generally available with MCP support
Copilot agent mode is the next evolution in AI-assisted development—and it's now generally available in the Visual Studio June update. Agent mode turns GitHu...
Latest posts
Installing Visual Studio from an Internal Intranet Website
We’re happy to announce that starting with Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6, Visual Studio layouts are available to install from an internal intranet website! Enterprise customers have long been able to download a particular version of Visual Studio, host it on a private network file share, and make it available for their clients to install. This download cache of Visual Studio product files is commonly known as a layout.  There are a few reasons why a company would choose to use layouts. For example, the administrator may want control what version of the product their organization uses. Or sometimes, the cli...
Visual Studio’s IntelliSense list can now steer GitHub Copilot code completions.
TL:DR GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio’s built-in AI assistance features are now better together. With the latest version of GitHub Copilot, changing your selection in Visual Studio's IntelliSense list steers the GitHub Copilot with additional context about your code, so you can easily explore the single and multi-line code completions to get just the code you need. Press TAB to accept the IntelliSense member, then TAB again to accept the Copilot prediction. With the latest release (version 1.84+), Copilot predictions are not only visible when the IntelliSense list when the IntelliSense is open, but your In...
Announcing C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code
We are thrilled to announce the preview release of C# Dev Kit, a new Visual Studio Code extension that brings an improved editor-first C# development experience to Linux, macOS, and Windows. The C# Dev Kit is designed to enhance your C# productivity when you’re working in VS Code. It works together with the C# extension, which has been updated to be powered by a new fully open-source Language Server Protocol (LSP) host, creating a performant, extensible, and flexible tooling environment that easily integrates new experiences into C# for VS Code. The source repo for this extension is in the process of being mig...
What’s New in SSDT 17.6: Ledger, Performance, Copilot
We are delighted to announce the new release of SQL Server Developer Tools for Visual Studio 17.6 released on May 16th, 2023. The major focus areas for this release are: SQL Server Developer Tools (SSDT) is a database tool within Visual Studio that lets users develop, build, test and publish their databases from a source-controlled project. It lets the users start from scratch with a new Database Project or import an existing database with a few clicks. SSDT is not available as a standalone installer but comes in the package with Visual Studio. We have added support to SQL Server 2022 ...
Iterating on your Welcome Experience feedback
One of Visual Studio’s goals is to help you quickly ‘get to code.’ We’ve recently experimented with Welcome Experience in Preview that helps you get to the code and tasks that you care about, right within the Visual Studio shell. Take a look at the original Welcome Experience design and its motivations in the previous blog post. Developers like you shared a lot of great feedback for that experience, so we’ve iterated once more. Read on to learn about the design and functionality changes we made to the Welcome Experience. To give this experience a try, please install the latest Visual Studio Preview build: ...
Create a Microsoft Power App for your ASP.NET Core Web API
Boost your developer journey by easily creating front ends for your web APIs. Low-code tooling is becoming increasingly popular among developers because it allows them to create applications faster and with less code. In Visual Studio 2022 17.6 preview 2, you can now connect to the Microsoft Power Platform via connected services and create custom connectors based on your ASP.NET web API. You can download the latest preview at Visual Studio Preview. In today’s blog post, we will cover prerequisites, how to create the custom connector from within Visual Studio and how to quickly build a front-end using Microsoft ...
Unified Settings: Share Your Feedback!
In a hybrid and cloud-based world, we want to make it easy for you to configure Visual Studio to your preferences whether you're working on a laptop from home, on your desktop in the office, or using a Dev Box or Azure VM. Unified Settings reimagines how you personalize your IDE with a modern UI that reacts to changes immediately, has portable storage, and offers full control over what is shared between different project workspaces and Visual Studio installations. Unified Settings helps you set up your environment with both individual and team/workspace settings in Visual Studio. The settings sync to the cloud...
All-In-One Search available in 17.6
The All-In-One Search experience was first introduced in 17.2 Previews, and we’ve been refining its quality since. The new search merges code and feature search capabilities into one UI, so you can go to one place to find the things you need. Real-time results and a preview of the results speed up the process to get you to the right place. You can learn more from this previous blog post. Now we’re ready to share it more broadly in the 17.6 release of Visual Studio! We’d appreciate any feedback you can provide on this Developer Community ticket. The new search experience is gradually rolling out so it ma...
Dev Drive for Performance Improvements in Visual Studio and Dev Boxes!
Performance has always been one of our key investment areas for developer tooling in Microsoft. We understand that it’s important for developers to have a fast workflow. That’s why we’re excited to share with you the support of Dev Drives in Visual Studio! Dev Drive for Visual Studio has just been released to help you optimize your workflow and increase your productivity. With Dev Drive, you can create a separate volume on your PC that will improve performance for disk-bound operations such as cloning, building, copying files, and package restore. We measured average improvements in these operations around of 25%...