How to Unlock Visual Studio 2022's Preview Features Like Claude Sonnet 3.7 AI Model
Advanced AI usually comes to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code before the company's Visual Studio IDE, due to the architectural differences of a lightweight, open-source-based code editor supplemented by all manner of extensions and a full-fledged, proprietary IDE with widely separated updates.
That doesn't sit well with some developers, which we documented last November in the article "Visual Studio Devs Demand Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI: 'Why Is VSC Always Preferred?'"
Well, say what you will about Microsoft, the dev teams closely monitor developer feedback and are adamantly focused on addressing it, though it might take years for some requested feature requests to be fulfilled.
And so the VS 2022 dev team did open up access to more models in Visual Studio 2022 17.12, but a Developer Community post saw a user decrying the limited model options: "After upgrading to Visual Studio 2022 version 17.12, while Copilot now allows switching between language models, only gpt-4o, o1, and o1-mini are available as options."
Things are better in Visual Studio 2022 v17.13, released last month (see "Visual Studio 2022 v17.13 Ships: 'Meet GitHub Copilot Free'").
Available models depend upon one's subscription level for GitHub Copilot, handled by Microsoft-owned GitHub.
Depending upon the GitHub Copilot subscription, developers could use models ranging from Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and and OpenAI's GPT-4o models in the free tier to Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's o1-preview and -mini models in for-pay plans.
However, just last week, Microsoft announced Claude 3.7 is now Available in GitHub Copilot for Visual Studio. To use it, developers need to have a paid subscription and enable it on the GitHub Copilot settings page.
For the latter, navigate to Settings where you can unlock preview features including Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Anthropic Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Google Gemini 2.0 Flash in Copilot. There, you can also enable Copilot to search the web.
[Click on image for larger view.] Enabling Preview Features (source: Ramel).
After enabling the Sonnet models, my model pick list now looks like this:
[Click on image for larger view.] Model Pick List (source: Ramel).
I did notice that while the Sonnet models were available, the Gemini Flash model didn't become immediately accessible like they did upon enablement. I might have to file a Developer Community bug report if it doesn't kick in soon. Or it may require some kind of subscription to a Google service or something. It looks like Microsoft's Rhea Patel, who announced the Sonnet 3.7 availability, might be having the same issue judging from the screenshot of her model pick list below, which looks just like mine -- or else she didn't enable it.
[Click on image for larger view.] Blog Post Model Pick List (source: Microsoft).
For the record, GitHub documentation shows Claude Sonnet 3.7 is currently available in:
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Copilot Chat in Visual Studio Code
- Copilot Chat in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.13 or later
- Immersive mode in Copilot Chat in GitHub
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Claude Sonnet 3.5 is currently available in:
- Copilot Chat in Visual Studio Code
- Copilot Chat in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.12 or later
- Immersive mode in Copilot Chat in GitHub
"Claude Sonnet is a family of large language models that you can use as an alternative to the default model used by Copilot Chat," the docs say. "Claude Sonnet excels at coding tasks across the entire software development lifecycle, from initial design to bug fixes, maintenance to optimizations. Learn more about the Sonnet's capabilities."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.