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Visual Studio's AI Future: Copilot .NET Upgrades and More
At this week's Microsoft Ignite conference, the Visual Studio team showed off a future AI-powered IDE that will leverage GitHub Copilot for legacy app .NET upgrades, along with several more cutting-edge features.
The sneak peek at Visual Studio's AI future came at the end of a lengthy and detailed examination of the current state of the IDE, titled "Discover GitHub Copilot's untapped potential in Visual Studio," just now made available for replay.
"I hear that people at Ignite want to see the future. They want to see what does it look like in a year, what's it going to look like next year? How far can we take this thing?" said presenter Scott Hanselman, a developer community VP who was joined by product managers Dalia Abo Sheasha and Jessie Houghton.
As far as the current and upcoming features in Visual Studio 2022, they are summed up in a screen grab.
[Click on image for larger view.] GitHub Copilot Features (source: Microsoft).
Looking ahead, a ".NET Upgrade with GitHub Copilot" demo upgraded the eShop Reference Application, the venerable AdventureWorks, to .NET 8. It was triggered by a right-click on the project and choosing a command to upgrade with GitHub Copilot.
Hanselman ran a video showing an accelerated upgrade process. It was accelerated because, "If you think you're going to go and take your enterprise customer and upgrade their legacy application in a minute and a half, that is nonsense."
A quick complicated conversion requiring lots of JSON conversions, for example, might be out of reach.
He described how it does work well with a little back-and-forth in an iterative process. "It makes a branch. It's using Upgrade Assistant to go and upgrade that. It's very verbose, and it's calling out all of the issues and all of the incidents, all the warnings, things that are mandatory, things that are not. And it's telling me at every level what it's doing. And then at any point, if I wanted to, I could open it up and see what's going on there. Again, this is a concept of a possible future."
[Click on image for larger view.] 108 Issues Addressed and More (source: Microsoft).
"So you can see here how this is then saying, 'Alright, well, the Upgrade Assistant did this, and then the Copilot system did that, and then we're going to need the developers to step in on for that, and we have some ideas around guidance as well.' So I think that this is a really cool future. Now we've got a Java version of this, but this is the.net version that is being conceived of," said Hanselman, who pointed to a waitlist to to join the GitHub Copilot upgrade assistant for .NET.
"That is a theoretical future that you could maybe be a part of," he said. "If you're excited about that, let us know, and we'll reach out to you."
As noted in that screen grab, other features on the horizon include:
- "Did you mean?" in Code search
- Web search function
- Support for adding images to chat
Meanwhile, a Nov. 22 blog post details "Top 5 GitHub Copilot Features in Visual Studio from Microsoft Ignite 2024. Those would be:
- Copilot Edits: Collaborative Iterations
- Vision: Code Smarter with Contextual Understanding
- Icebreakers: A Launchpad for Productivity
- Function Calling: Bridging Gaps in Logic
- Custom Instructions: Your Copilot, Your Way
"The advancements showcased at Ignite reaffirm GitHub Copilot's role as a transformative tool for developers," the post said. "From simplifying multi-file edits to embracing team-specific workflows, these features show how AI can be both powerful and adaptable."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.