News

Visual Studio 2022 v17.13 Ships: 'Meet GitHub Copilot Free'

• By David Ramel
• 02/12/2025

New Copilot AI features and functionality mark the latest edition of Microsoft's flagship IDE, Visual Studio 2022 v17.13.

"Meet GitHub Copilot Free," says a heading in the company's Feb. 11 announcement and accompanying release notes. Developers with GitHub accounts are now allowed 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. Signing up for Copilot Free in the Chat window provides benefits -- tailored to match your coding style and project needs, Microsoft says -- listed by the company as:

• Get instant suggestions and completions to accelerate your development.
• Use natural language prompts for AI-driven edits across multiple files directly in your editor.
• Easily navigate and understand your projects with our intuitive chat feature.

Microsoft actually announced the free tier last month. Microsoft-owned GitHub itself announced the free plan a couple months ago (see the Dec. 18, 2024, article: "Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans"). GitHub provided this plan comparison:

Further expanding on the functionality of the plans detailed by GitHub shows:

• Free Tier
  • Code Completions: Up to 2,000 completions per month.
  • Chat Requests: Up to 50 chat requests per month.
  • Models: Access to Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o models.
  • Usage: Suitable for occasional users and small projects.
  • Availability: Integrated into VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, and GitHub.com.
• Copilot Pro: $10 USD per month or $100 USD per year.
  • Unlimited Code Completions: No limit on the number of completions.
  • Unlimited Chat Requests: No limit on the number of chat requests.
  • Additional Models: Access to Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's o1-preview and -mini models.
  • Usage: Suitable for professional developers and larger projects.
• Copilot Business: $19 USD per granted seat per month.
  • Unlimited Code Completions: No limit on the number of completions.
  • Unlimited Chat Requests: No limit on the number of chat requests.
  • Additional Models: Access to Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's o1-preview and -mini models.
  • Usage: Suitable for organizations with multiple developers.
• Copilot Enterprise: $39 USD per granted seat per month.
  • Unlimited Code Completions: No limit on the number of completions.
  • Unlimited Chat Requests: No limit on the number of chat requests.
  • Additional Models: Access to Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's o1-preview and -mini models.
  • Usage: Suitable for enterprises with extensive development needs.

The dev team's emphasis on AI is reflected by seven different items for GitHub Copilot in yesterday's announcement guidance, just one fewer than Debugging & diagnostics, which itself lists a feature related to Copilot Chat. So, if there was any doubt: These day's it's all about Copilot AI in Visual Studio 2022.

Here are other Copilot features in the new release:

• Code Referencing for GitHub Copilot Completions: Displays public code matches in completions for increased transparency.
• Vision Support in Copilot Chat: Allows image attachments in GitHub Copilot Chat for improved communication.
• GitHub Copilot Shortcuts: Adds new keyboard shortcuts for managing chat threads.
• Slash Command Expansions: Expands slash commands into natural language for easier use.
• Cross-File Copilot Edits: Enables iterative edits across multiple files.

  

• Function Calling in Copilot Chat: Automatically retrieves relevant context for improved understanding without manual input.

AI is also infused throughout other functional areas of the IDE, including "Productivity" under which is AI-enhanced Feature Search, helping developers get detailed responses for queries about menu items, commands, or settings. Copilot Chat can interpret vague or imprecise queries, understand the user's Visual Studio version, and provide relevant answers -- all without leaving the IDE.

"Based on your feature requests, several new tools and enhancements have been added to this release," said Mads Kristensen, principal product manager. "This update includes improvements for developers, such as advanced debugging capabilities, efficient code management, and enhanced security features. These additions aim to simplify workflows and boost productivity."

New features added to the IDE are often first available in the company's lightweight Visual Studio Code editor, including the aforementioned Copilot Edits (see "GitHub Previews Agentic AI in VS Code Copilot"). One Copilot feature that didn't make it into Visual Studio 2022 v17.3 is Copilot Next Edit Suggestions (Copilot NES), which is still in preview (see "VS Code Copilot Gets Closer to Tab, Tab, Tab Coding"). "Based on the edits you're making, Copilot NES both predicts the location of the next edit you'll want to make and what that edit should be," Microsoft said. "NES suggests future changes relevant to your current work, and you can simply Tab to quickly navigate and accept suggestions."

So that may be coming down the pipleline, foreshadowing future scenarios when developers simply provide detailed instructions on what kind of app they want to build and then just mainly accept recommendations when the coding starts. However, it wasn't mentioned in yesterday's first preview of Visual Studio 2022 v17.14.

Most of the new features in today's release have been revealed in a series of previews, (see "Visual Studio Copilot Improves Feature Search, Shortcuts, Slash Commands"), and Kristensen boiled everything down into a series of bullet-point items that are fleshed out in the release notes:

Productivity

• Customize file encoding: Specify the default encoding for saving files in Visual Studio.
• Reimagine the horizontal scrollbar: The horizontal scrollbar in the editor now repositions itself to always be accessible, even when space is limited.
• Choose whether to indent word wrap: You can now specify whether lines that wrap in the editor should be indented.
• Navigate to recent files in Code Search: In Code Search, you can now easily jump between your recent files.
• Enhanced line & column navigation: Visual Studio now supports advanced line and column navigation in Code Search.

Debugging & diagnostics

• Highlight syntax with IEnumerable Visualizer: Enhanced editable expression with syntax highlighting is now available.
• Craft complex LINQ queries: Enhanced editable expression with GitHub Copilot Inline Chat directly in the IEnumerable Visualizer.
• Streamline debugging for native code: The Visual Studio profiler’s instrumentation tool now supports targeted instrumentation for native code.
• Thread summaries in Parallel Stacks: Enhance the debugging process with AI thread summaries in Parallel Stacks.
• Display unified async stacks in profiler: The Visual Studio profiler unifies async stacks for streamlined .NET profiling.
• Use color-coded swim lanes for CPU profiling: The Visual Studio profiler enables multiprocess CPU analysis with color-coded graphs and filtering.

Git tooling

• Add comments on pull requests: Review pull requests in Visual Studio by adding new comments to the files on the checked-out branch.
• Catch issues at commit time: Get GitHub Copilot-powered suggestions for your code changes to help you catch potential issues early and improve your code quality.
• View and manage Git tags: Navigate and push Git tags seamlessly from Visual Studio.

IDE

• Preserve font preferences across themes: Changing themes will now preserve your font and font size preferences.
• Onboard a GitHub account: Add GitHub accounts from the first launch wizard or the Visual Studio shell.
• Manage multiple GitHub accounts: Add multiple GitHub accounts and set an active account to drive GitHub features like GitHub Copilot and version control.
• Add a new markdown file: Adding a new markdown file just got easier with the new template available in the Add New Item dialog.
• Check out the new features in the Teams Toolkit: Learn about the Teams Toolkit improvements in the new release.

Cloud

• Leverage .NET Aspire and Azure Functions: Azure Functions can now use .NET Aspire to integrate serverless technology into .NET Aspire.
• Launch a new Docker configuration: Enable depends_on support with the DependencyAwareStart launch configuration option.
• Add scale to Docker Compose: The scale property in Docker Compose is now supported.

Web

• Extract HTML to Razor component: Use a code action to easily extract HTML to a Razor component in Visual Studio.
• Disable format on paste for Razor files: You can now disable the format on paste feature for Razor in Visual Studio.

Data

• Use SDK-style SQL projects in SSDT: You can now use the SDK-style project file format in your SQL Server Data Tools projects with enhanced SQL debugging and schema comparison capabilities.