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.
Visual Studio Code 1.121 focuses on agent workflows, model configuration, terminal behavior and built-in preview features -- and features another update to Claude Code functionality.
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.
Microsoft announced a new VSLive! Microsoft AI Hackathon 2026, an in-person build event at its Redmond campus focused on Microsoft Foundry, Azure OpenAI, GitHub Copilot and agent-based development.
GitHub Spec Kit, open sourced last September as a toolkit for spec-driven development with AI coding agents, is seeing renewed attention as recent releases and a May 8 livestream show the project expanding around the idea that code should be generated from, governed by and traceable to specifications.
The new weekly update focuses on agent workflows, observability, trust controls, Markdown usability and engineering changes.
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'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.
Just two days after GitHub announced usage-based billing for Copilot, Microsoft shipped VS Code 1.118 -- under its new weekly release cadence -- with significant token efficiency improvements designed to keep costs down when the meter starts running June 1.
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.
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026, prompting user concerns about predictability, model access, monthly credit limits and whether unchanged plan prices will translate into less included usage.
VS Code 1.117 adds bring-your-own model key support for Copilot Business and Enterprise users and introduces a set of chat, agent, terminal, and TypeScript updates.
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.
Microsoft says the beta is production-ready for many day-to-day workflows and CI pipelines.
Remember when you had to really dig in concentrate and understand exactly how C# and other code worked at the most basic levels? Then you'll like Microsoft's early preview of .NET 11.
At VSLive! Las Vegas, Mads Kristensen revealed Visual Studio 2027 as part of a broader shift toward AI-assisted development and a more continuous release cadence for Microsoft's flagship IDE.
Across the April 8 and April 15, 2026 releases, Visual Studio Code expanded its agent-focused tooling with a new companion app, better terminal interaction, session debugging and more built-in Copilot functionality.