{"id":255172,"date":"2025-12-16T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T15:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/?p=255172"},"modified":"2025-12-10T13:55:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T21:55:19","slug":"visual-studio-2026-debugging-with-copilot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/visual-studio-2026-debugging-with-copilot\/","title":{"rendered":"Debugging, but Without the Drama (A Visual Studio 2026 Story)"},"content":{"rendered":"

It starts the way these things always start.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A red build.<\/span>\nA failing test.<\/span>\nAnd that quiet, sinking feeling of\u00a0<\/span>\u201cThis worked yesterday.\u201d<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Meet Sam. Sam\u2019s not a junior, not a rockstar,\u00a0just a solid developer\u00a0who\u2019s\u00a0shipped enough code to know that bugs\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0care how confident you feel on Monday morning.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That test failure does not offer much help at all. There are no clear steps to reproduce the issue.\u00a0The exception message seems familiar in a vague way.\u00a0But it does not prove useful right then.\u00a0Out of habit Sam hits F5.\u00a0He notices something small yet\u00a0pretty important\u00a0about it.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The debugger launches faster than before<\/strong>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>No long pause, no breaking his flow. Sam gets straight into debugging, and that small improvement already feels like a win.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Exception Knows More Than It Used To<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

The app crashes. Sam opens the\u00a0exception\u00a0details. Normally,\u00a0he\u2019d\u00a0read the error message, scroll through the stack trace, which shows the chain of function calls that led to the crash and start guessing what went wrong.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This time, things feel different. Exception Assistance \u2018s Copilot analysis<\/strong> looked at the whole repository, not just the file in front of Sam. It checks past bugs, old pull requests, and even fixes from months ago. It notices a similar error that happened after a validation tweak, flags the code paths that might have been hit, and points to places where that odd value could have slipped in.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If Sam wants a different angle, he can\u00a0pick\u00a0any\u00a0model in Copilot\u00a0Chat to analyze the\u00a0exception\u00a0the way that fits the problem. And for trickier, nested, or chained errors, Copilot may decide it needs more context and offer to dig deeper.\u00a0\u00a0Sam can continue with the deeper analysis to get a more context-driven,\u00a0accurate\u00a0understanding of what went wrong, without losing control of the investigation<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What used to take hours now feels like a conversation with a teammate who knows the history of your code and points you exactly where you need to look.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Want to see this in action?<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n