Visual Studio Blog

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, from WinForms maintenance to C++ modernization. The post Visual Studio February Update appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

Agents in Visual Studio now go beyond a single general-purpose assistant. We’re shipping a set of curated preset agents that tap into deep IDE capabilities; debugging, profiling, testing alongside a framework for building your own custom agents tailored to how your team works. Built in agents Each preset agent is designed around a specific developer The post Custom Agents in Visual Studio: Built in and Build-Your-Own agents appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

Refactoring at scale is a time-consuming and error-prone process for developers. In large codebases, developers have relied on manual searches and incremental edits across multiple files to accomplish these tasks. Modern development workflows depend on fast and accurate code navigation to avoid these pitfalls. When developers refactor existing code, explore unfamiliar areas of a large The post Unlock language-specific rich symbol context using new find_symbol tool appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

After a busy January (catch up here), we’re shifting focus to reliability and refinement. This month is about tightening core workflows, improving agent stability, and building on the MCP foundations we’ve been laying. Agent Mode & Coding Agents Reliability is the priority this month. We’re raising the floor on agent-driven scenarios with: Better progress and The post Roadmap for AI in Visual Studio (February) appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

If you use editor productivity extensions for Visual Studio 2026, there’s good news—they can now load faster! Extension developers with existing MEF-based editor productivity extensions should read this blog to learn about recent changes and how they might be affected.  We introduced VisualStudio.Extensibility to simplify the creation of Visual Studio extensions for developers. Previously, handling threads in VSSDK-based extensions The post Performance improvements to MEF-based editor productivity extensions appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

Productivity Improvements This month, we are bringing you a series of small yet long requested and popular features to let you better control and customize your editor. These features are currently only available in the Insiders channel and will be available in Release soon. Fast scrolling: Hold down the Alt key while scrolling the mouse wheel The post Visual Studio January Update — Enhanced Editor Experience appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

Are you wasting time reviewing code for nits on code standards, project preferences, or important contribution guidelines? We know the pain. It’s all too easy for best practices and those tiny but critical team details to slip through the cracks, resulting in inconsistencies, confusion, and wasted time. But now, there’s a smarter way to ensure everyone’s always on the same The post Copilot Memories appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

I always enjoy the quiet stretch between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s one of the few moments in the year when things slow down just enough to reflect on what actually resonated. While many of us were unplugging, our digital team was doing the opposite, editing and publishing 19 sessions from VS Live! Orlando to The post Welcome to 2026, A Growth Year for All of Us appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

I struggled to get started. For ages, I kept putting off building this website, creating a new programming language for Visual Studio, and coming up with fresh color themes. Each project looked overwhelming, and I couldn’t find the time or motivation to jump in. It all just felt like too much at once. But when The post How AI fixed my procrastination appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.

It starts the way these things always start.  A red build. A failing test. And that quiet, sinking feeling of “This worked yesterday.”  Meet Sam. Sam’s not a junior, not a rockstar, just a solid developer who’s shipped enough code to know that bugs don’t care how confident you feel on Monday morning.  That test failure does not offer much help The post Debugging, but Without the Drama (A Visual Studio 2026 Story) appeared first on Visual Studio Blog.