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
Jun 17, 2025
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Agent mode is now generally available with MCP support

Rhea Patel Filisha Shah Allie Barry
Rhea,
Filisha,
Allie

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...

.NETVisual StudioGitHub Copilot

Latest posts

Build Visual Studio extensions using Visual Studio extensions
Dec 20, 2018
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Build Visual Studio extensions using Visual Studio extensions

Mads Kristensen
Mads Kristensen

What if the community of extension authors banded together to add powerful features to Visual Studio that made it easier to create extensions? That’s the idea behind Extensibility Essentials – an extension pack that ships community-recommended extensions for extension authors.

Visual Studio Code Updates for Java Developers: Rename, Logpoints, TestNG and More
Dec 14, 2018
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Visual Studio Code Updates for Java Developers: Rename, Logpoints, TestNG and More

Xiaokai He
Xiaokai He

We're proud to announce an update to the Java Extension Pack, including new Language Support for Java(TM) by Red Hat, Debugger for Java, Maven, Java Test Runner and Java Dependency Viewer.

Get to code: How we designed the new Visual Studio start window
Dec 13, 2018
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Get to code: How we designed the new Visual Studio start window

Cathy Sullivan
Cathy Sullivan

A month ago, we shared a sneak peek of the experienc, the blog post A preview of UX and UI changes, and mentioned the research and observation that we used as input into the design and development. This is the story about how we got there.

New Azure DevOps Work Item Experience in Visual Studio 2019
Dec 12, 2018
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New Azure DevOps Work Item Experience in Visual Studio 2019

Dan Hellem
Dan Hellem

In previous versions of Visual Studio, the work item experience was centered around queries, which need to be created and managed to find the right work items. In Visual Studio 2019, we have removed queries and added a new view for work items centered at the developer. This allows the developer to quickly find the work they need and associate them to their pending changes. Removing the need for queries.

New Benefits in Visual Studio Subscriptions
Dec 11, 2018
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New Benefits in Visual Studio Subscriptions

Lan Kaim
Lan Kaim

With CAST Highlight, Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers can rapidly scan their application source code to identify the cloud readiness of their applications for migration to Microsoft Azure and monitor progress of their app both during and after a migration. Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers are eligible for two 90-day free licenses to the full-featured CloudPilot, while Visual Studio Professional subscribers can take advantage of one 30-day license to scan apps and databases of millions of lines of code in minutes.

New Preview label for Visual Studio extensions
Dec 7, 2018
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New Preview label for Visual Studio extensions

Mads Kristensen
Mads Kristensen

Visual Studio extensions can now be marked with a Preview label which is shown very clearly on the Visual Studio Marketplace. This gives your customers clear expectations that this version could contain issues as you are actively developing new features. Learn how to enable the Preview label here.

Visual Studio Live Share for real-time code reviews and interactive education
Dec 6, 2018
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Visual Studio Live Share for real-time code reviews and interactive education

Jon Chu
Jon Chu

Collaborating with your team using Visual Studio Live Share keeps getting easier! Since making Live Share available for the public use at BUILD last May, we’ve heard so much great feedback from our users, which has helped guide us in continuing to build a tool that truly enables developers to collaborate in all the ways they need from the comfort of their favorite tools. Your feedback has pointed us towards new collaboration scenarios that we had not previously thought of (e.g. technical interviews and hackathons), as well helped us prioritize releasing some of the biggest feature requests and issues, like sharin...

Visual Studio IntelliCode supports more languages and learns from your code
Dec 5, 2018
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Visual Studio IntelliCode supports more languages and learns from your code

Mark Wilson-Thomas
Mark Wilson-Thomas

At Build 2018, we announced Visual Studio IntelliCode, a set of AI-assisted capabilities that improve developer productivity. IntelliCode includes features like contextual IntelliSense code completion recommendations, code formatting, and style rule inference. IntelliCode has just received some major updates that make its context-sensitive AI-assisted IntelliSense recommendations even better. You can download the updated IntelliCode Extension for Visual Studio and IntelliCode Extension for Visual Studio Code today! The Visual Studio extension already works with the newly-release Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1. ...

Making every developer more productive with Visual Studio 2019
Dec 4, 2018
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Making every developer more productive with Visual Studio 2019

Visual Studio Team
Visual Studio Team

Today, in the Microsoft Connect(); 2018 keynote, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1. This is the first preview of the next major version of Visual Studio. In this Preview, we’ve focused on a few key areas, such as making it faster to open and work with projects stored in git repositories, improving IntelliSense with Artificial Intelligence (AI) (a feature we call Visual Studio IntelliCode), and making it easier to collaborate with your teammates by integrating Live Share. With each preview, we’ll be adding capabilities, improving performance, and refining the user experience,...