Microsoft's Build 2026 Windows developer announcements point to a broader platform strategy for agentic AI, spanning terminal workflows, local models, app-building skills, Cloud PCs and operating system-level containment.
Uno Platform is positioning itself as a cross-platform modernization path for Windows Presentation Foundation apps, combining incremental migration, AI-assisted code translation, Model Context Protocol tooling and runtime validation.
Microsoft Senior Content Developer Alvin Ashcraft explains how to use .NET MAUI, the MAUI Community Toolkit and MVVM Toolkit to speed up cross-platform app development with practical patterns for XAML, C# Markup and device features
Microsoft is applying lessons from Rust to C# in a planned redesign of the unsafe code model, continuing a years-long company focus on reducing memory-safety risks historically associated with C and C++
Microsoft highlighted Copilot planning, context visibility, diff review updates and MSVC Build Tools v14.51 in its May Visual Studio update.
Jason Bock shares practical guidance for building faster .NET applications, avoiding modernization pitfalls, and using proven performance resources to keep improving over time.
Developers are pressing Microsoft to restore the Blue theme in Visual Studio 2026, arguing that the issue is about contrast, readability and usability rather than nostalgia for an old color scheme.
.NET 11 Preview 4 delivers a broad set of developer-facing updates across .NET MAUI, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, Entity Framework Core, the SDK, libraries and runtime performance work.
CNCF graduation, Microsoft tooling updates and cloud-provider support show broader OpenTelemetry adoption across developer platforms.
A small social media poll from Visual Studio guru Mads Kristensen split respondents over whether the IDE should add more database tooling, while the discussion quickly turned to existing SQL project support, SDK-style SQL projects and the broader state of Microsoft's database developer tooling.
This hands-on build shows how Agent Mode in Visual Studio 2026 -- Insiders now, stable soon --can create and operationalize a custom Copilot skill that automates feature-parity tracking with practical system integration and measurable reporting value.
Simona Liao and Leah Tran, product managers at Microsoft, discuss how GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio has evolved from a code completion tool into an agent-driven development workflow -- and share practical tips for developers and teams looking to integrate AI into their everyday processes.
Rockford Lhotka previews his Visual Studio Live! San Diego session, "MCP Magic," and explains why the Model Context Protocol is becoming a key building block for AI agents. In this Q&A, he discusses how C# developers can build MCP servers, connect them to agents, and design tool layers that are useful, scalable, and production-ready.
Microsoft's Mads Kristensen said subagents are "coming soon" to Copilot in Visual Studio, while VS Code already documents subagent support across context isolation, custom agents, parallel execution and search.
Microsoft Product Manager Mike Kistler previews his Visual Studio Live! session on how MCP servers give .NET developers a universal standard for connecting AI models to external data and tools -- and how to build them with the C# SDK. Microsoft's Leslie Richardson is a co-presenter.
Microsoft's WinUI 3 Gallery 2.9 gives developers a working reference app for trying Windows App SDK 2.0 controls, APIs and improvements without starting a new project.
Dr. James McCaffrey presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of quadratic regression, implemented from scratch, with pseudo-inverse training, using the C# language. Compared to standard linear regression, quadratic regression is better able to handle data with a non-linear structure and interactions between predictor variables. Compared to other types of training, pseudo-inverse does not require any parameters that must be determined by trial and error.
- By James McCaffrey
- 05/01/2026
Visual Studio 2026 has further integrated GitHub Copilot's cloud agent to its Copilot Chat picker -- catching up to VS Code -- and the async workflow it enables, where a task runs on GitHub Actions infrastructure while the developer moves on, is a meaningfully different way to use AI assistance.
The April update suppresses Copilot completions while IntelliSense is active, addressing a long-running editor conflict.
Microsoft's new move to ship Azure MCP tools inside Visual Studio 2022 adds to a small but notable pattern of selected Visual Studio 2026-era functionality later showing up in the older IDE, led by a cluster of MCP management features and, outside the MCP category, the Copilot Profiler Agent.