Showing archive results for 2026

In March 2026, developers came together at VS Live! Las Vegas for a full week of technical learning, hands-on exploration, and a lot of great conversations about where software development is headed next. From AI-assisted development to modern .NET, cloud-native apps, and developer productivity, one thing was clear: the pace of change is not slowin...

Azure MCP tools now ship built into Visual Studio 2022 — no extension required Azure MCP tools are now built into Visual Studio 2022 as part of the Azure development workload — no separate extension to find, install, or update. You can enable over 230 tools across 45 Azure services directly in GitHub Copilot Chat and manage Azure resources, depl...

We’ve all been there: a bug report lands in your inbox with a title like "App crashes sometimes" and zero reproduction steps. Your morning, which was supposed to be spent building new features, is now a forensic investigation. You’re setting scattershot breakpoints, staring at the call stack, and trying to guess what the original reporter was think...

Make Visual Studio floating windows work perfectly with PowerToys FancyZones. Flip one option to get independent windows, better snapping, and less friction.

Bookmarks in Visual Studio have always been a simple, reliable feature. Many developers use them regularly, and over the years we’ve heard consistent feedback from those users. Bookmarks were useful, but there were a few core gaps that kept them from being as effective and relevant as they could be. Navigation was one of the biggest pain points....

This month's Visual Studio update gives you new ways to customize GitHub Copilot. Custom agents allow you to build specialized Copilot agents tailored to your team's workflow, backed by the tools and knowledge sources that matter to your project. Alongside that, agent skills bring reusable instruction sets, and a new find_symbol tool gives agents l...

A few months ago, I was talking with a developer who said something that stuck with me:  “I love building apps. I just don’t love rebuilding the same UI controls over and over again.”  That’s the reality for a lot of teams. You want to focus on your business logic, your architecture, your differentiation. Instead, you burn cycles wiring up gr...

Get the Inside Scoop on Visual Studio Subscriptions, Straight to Your Inbox  A few weeks ago I was talking with a Visual Studio Enterprise subscriber. Seasoned .NET developer. Ships production code. Knows his stack inside and out.  During the conversation I mentioned one of the training benefits included in his subscription.  He stoppe...

When I first found Visual Studio Dev Essentials, it felt like discovering a hidden door in the developer toolkit world. I’d heard about free tools and cloud credits, but I wasn’t sure if it would really matter in day-to-day coding life. The short answer: it absolutely does.  What struck me most was how the program was built with real developers ...

This month’s Visual Studio update continues our focus on helping you move faster and stay in flow, with practical improvements across AI assistance, debugging, testing, and modernization. Building on the momentum from January’s editor updates, the February release brings smarter diagnostics and targeted support for real world development scenarios,...