News

GitHub Copilot for Azure Previews in Visual Studio 2022

• By David Ramel
• 08/26/2025

Microsoft is bringing its Azure-aware Copilot experience to Visual Studio 2022. The new GitHub Copilot for Azure extension, now in Public Preview for newer Visual Studio 2022 editions, surfaces Azure tools inside Copilot Chat's Agent Mode so developers can inspect resources, check diagnostics, fetch logs, and deploy applications without leaving the IDE.

Yesterday the company announced the preview of the extension that manages an Azure MCP (Model Context Protocol) server under the hood, which is used by Copilot to perform authenticated actions against Azure services. The goal is to streamline day-to-day Azure tasks from within Visual Studio, reducing context switching and speeding up iteration for teams that build and operate on Azure. The Azure MCP server exposes Azure resources and commands as tools to Copilot, handling authentication and executing structured actions (queries, diagnostics, deployments) from within the IDE.

As shown below, the Visual Studio tool has been installed 186 times a day after the public preview announcement. The related Visual Studio Code tool, released in October 2024 and updated last month, is now at more than 570,000 installs.

Capabilities and Typical Use
Inside Agent Mode, developers can direct Copilot to perform concrete Azure tasks. Common scenarios include listing and inspecting resources across tenants and subscriptions, checking service health and recent incidents, pulling application logs, restarting services, and deploying app updates using the Azure Developer CLI (azd). The extension also exposes the ability to invoke Azure CLI commands when a lower level action is required. Coverage spans core services developers touch most often, including App Service, Azure Container Apps, AKS, Functions, Storage, databases such as Cosmos DB and Azure SQL, container registries, and Key Vault. In practice, that means a developer investigating a failure in a Web App can ask Copilot to find the resource by name, retrieve recent logs, summarize errors, and propose next steps, then push a fix with azd in the same chat flow.

Setup and Requirements
The extension targets Visual Studio 2022 17.14 or later. It requires a Copilot subscription with Copilot Chat enabled in Visual Studio and a Microsoft identity with access to at least one Azure subscription. After installing the extension, open Copilot Chat and switch to Agent Mode. From there, select the Azure tools so Copilot can call them when it needs to. The first time you use it, the extension initializes the Azure MCP server automatically and handles updates over time.

For Visual Studio developers, the key shift is that Azure operational tasks are now first-class inside the IDE where .NET and C++ projects already live. The managed MCP server reduces setup friction, and the Agent Mode toolbox makes it clear when Copilot is using Azure-specific tools vs. general chat. Teams that live in Visual Studio for coding, debugging, and profiling can now perform many routine Azure interactions without pivoting to a browser, CLI windows, or a separate editor.

How This Relates to the Existing VS Code Offering
Microsoft previously shipped GitHub Copilot for Azure for Visual Studio Code. That implementation introduced the core model of using MCP servers and Agent Mode to let Copilot manage Azure resources directly from the editor. The Visual Studio preview brings that same approach to the full IDE and aligns the experiences so both environments can drive authenticated resource queries, diagnostics, and deployments. As is often the case, the capabilities first appeared in VS Code and are now arriving in Visual Studio with IDE-specific integration and guidance.

Availability and More
As noted, the Visual Studio extension is available in Public Preview for Visual Studio 2022 17.14 and later editions of VS 2022. Documentation covers using MCP servers with Copilot, getting started with the Azure MCP Server in VS Code, and details of the GitHub Copilot for Azure tooling. Marketplace listings are available for both the Visual Studio and VS Code extensions, and the Visual Studio Blog post provides announcement details and examples. For teams standardizing on Visual Studio, this closes a gap by bringing the Azure Copilot experience directly into the IDE and aligning it with Agent Mode and MCP features that have been rolling out across Microsoft's developer tools.

"We're committed to continuously expanding the Azure toolset and deepening the integration with Visual Studio, all on top of the robust MCP foundation that is now generally available in Visual Studio," the team said. "If you're already using GitHub Copilot, we encourage you to try out GitHub Copilot for Azure and experience the new capabilities firsthand. Your feedback is invaluable--let us know which Azure scenarios you'd like to automate next and help shape the future of GitHub Copilot for Azure!"

Developer feedback is parked here.