News

Microsoft to Detail Visual Studio 2026 at Visual Studio Live! in Orlando

• By David Ramel
• 10/02/2025

Microsoft today announced that the brand-new Visual Studio 2026 will be the star of the show at the Visual Studio Live! developer conference in Orlando in November.

Mads Kristensen, principal PM for Visual Studio, will kick things off in a keynote address titled "The Road to Visual Studio 2026: Building a Faster, Smarter IDE." But that's just the beginning, according to Microsoft's Jim Harrer.

"From breakfast to late afternoon, Live! 360 delivers back-to-back sessions, workshops, and labs led by Microsoft product managers and industry experts," said Harrer, a senior product marketing manager at Microsoft. "When the formal agenda ends, the real learning begins at evening networking events--grab a drink, compare notes with peers, or pick the brains of speakers and Product Managers of the Tools and Products you use every day. You'll level-up your knowledge and discover how other Visual Studio users solve challenges just like yours."

The keynote promises to "Explore the engineering breakthroughs behind Visual Studio 2026's performance gains and AI integrations that make coding smoother and more intuitive."

As Visual Studio Magazine readers well know, Visual Studio 2026 is shaping up to be a significant release, first debuting last month as an Insiders build.

With AI capabilities being central in Visual Studio 2026, GitHub Copilot is embedded across the IDE with several notable upgrades found in the release notes:

• Adaptive Paste: Copilot adjusts pasted snippets to match project conventions, including fixing errors, translating between languages, and formatting code.
• Context Menu Actions: Developers can now right-click for Copilot actions like explain code, optimize, generate comments, and add selections to chat.
• "Did You Mean?" Search: Copilot improves file searches by suggesting matches for typos or fuzzy queries.
• Profiler Agent: An AI-powered profiler analyzes CPU and memory, surfaces bottlenecks, and generates benchmarks, with natural language commands like "@profiler why is my app slow?".
• Bring Your Own Model: Developers can connect their own AI models (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI) for Visual Studio Chat.

And, of course, AI will be front and center along with Visual Studio 2026, with Harrer also highlighting sessions such as "Next-Level Debugging with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio" and "Agentic DevOps in Real Life: Build Faster, Ship Safer."

Microsoft Touts Cost Savings
"If you're a Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscriber, sign in to my.visualstudio.com to unlock your Priority Code and save up to $900 off the regular price," Harrer said. "Not a subscriber? Early bird pricing is available on the Live! 360 event page--but act fast, early bird is ending! Bring your team and take advantage of group rates, lab bundles, and hotel packages at Royal Pacific or Sapphire Falls."

Note that Live! 360 Tech Con is a huge umbrella event, featuring six co-located events, with the full gamut including:

• Visual Studio Live!: Deep dives on .NET, C#, DevOps, and the latest IDE features
• Data Platform Live!: Best practices for databases, analytics, and big data
• TechMentor: Hands-on architecture, design patterns, and leadership
• Artificial Intelligence Live!: Practical AI, machine learning, and cognitive services
• Cloud & Containers Live!: Modern architectures, Kubernetes, and serverless
• Cybersecurity & Ransomware Live!: Threat defense, compliance, and incident response

"Mix and match sessions across disciplines to tackle your toughest problems, whether you're a developer, data pro, cloud engineer, or security specialist," Harrer said.

The Visual Studio Live! series of developer education conferences, and the big Live! 360 Tech Con event, are produced by the parent company of Visual Studio Magazine.