Microsoft has released a preview of Visual Studio 2026, the first major version update since 2021, promising deeper AI integration and a new look and feel.

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Visual Studio 2026 embraces fluent design and offers new themes, but developers care more about the code and tools

Visual Studio is the second most popular IDE after VS Code, so the first major update in five years sounds like a big deal for developers. Visual Studio 2022, also known as version 17.x, was first released in November 2021. The new version will be 18.x. Yet based on the information [2]revealed by principal product manager Mads Kristensen, and The Register 's download of the preview, the changes are incremental rather than revolutionary.

Changes highlighted by Kristensen include a new logo, the renaming of Visual Studio Preview to Visual Studio Insiders, refreshed UI using Microsoft's Fluent Design system, improved theming with new themes including Mango Paradise and Juicy Plum, and of course deeper AI integration.

These are not things that developers care much about, AI aside; but there is more information in a recent [3]presentation on the future of Visual Studio, and in the [4]release notes .

New features in Visual Studio 2026 include model choice and adaptive paste

VS 2026 has more hooks to enable Copilot to get context and intervene, enabling features such as the profiler copilot agent which will benchmark code, look for potential optimizations, and implement them on your behalf.

Another example is adaptive paste, where Copilot will automatically adjust pasted code to fit the context of existing code.

URL context in Copilot lets developers reference a URL in the chat, such as asking the AI to follow guidelines in a web document.

Selecting Manage Models enables choice of model and API key

Visual Studio users will be able to choose their own LLM (large language model). A dropdown enables selection of different models, and developers can apply their own API key for a provider for which they have a subscription, selecting between Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.

Settings in VS 2026 are now based on an editable JSON file, and the settings dialog has rich filtering features, such as the ability to see all settings that are not the default. Settings can be checked into source control and travel with a project.

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Code coverage, which shows how much code is covered by unit tests, and was previously a feature unique to the enterprise edition, has been enabled for VS Community and Professional.

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Kristensen said that VS 2026 is backward compatible with extensions for VS 2022, which is good news for developers upgrading but perhaps another clue that the changes are not dramatic.

The team behind NDepend, a code quality tool for .NET, [8]said that "Visual Studio vNext will remain a 64-bit application, but its main process will still run on the legacy .NET Framework. For extension publishers like us at NDepend, which run partly inside the VS process, this prevents a full migration to .NET 10 and joy with the latest C# language and runtime features." Many of the child processes spawned by the IDE do run on .NET Core, they added.

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VS 2026 comes with a tool to modernize .NET Framework applications to .NET 10, which will be the current LTS (long term support) version by the time this is released, but it seems that the product itself is still hooked to the old Windows-only .NET.

[10]Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

[11]Gitpod reinvents itself as Ona in pivot to AI agent platform

[12]'Huge architectural change' to JetBrains ReSharper cuts Visual Studio freezes

[13]GitHub engineer claims team was 'coerced' to put Grok into Copilot

Comments on the YouTube presentation suggest that Microsoft’s focus on AI features is not for everyone, and that Microsoft may be missing other aspects that matter. One asked for the focus to shift to "performance improvements and resource efficiency … even medium size solutions guzzle memory like it’s an infinite resource." Kristensen does state that performance is improved but it is too soon to say how much change there is in this area. Another common response is that despite its name, VS is lacking in visual designers, such as for WinUI 3.

The most requested VS feature (though closed as "out of scope") is for a Linux version, which raises the question of how VS sits in relation to the ubiquitous VS Code, which is cross-platform. Kristensen said there are now 50 million developers using one of the products in the Visual Studio "family", but the majority of these are using VS Code rather than Visual Studio.

Nevertheless, this looks like a promising upgrade. According to Kristensen, the team has fixed 4489 issues and 290 feature requests over the last 12 months, many of these reserved for VS 2026.

No release date has yet been given, but we would not be surprised to see this generally available around the same time as .NET 10 in November. ®

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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/09/10/vs2026fluent.jpg

[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-2026-insiders-is-here/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQaZytCQsLE

[4] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/visualstudio/releases/vs18/release-notes-insiders

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aMGglYFhmIvctkmhztYfDwAAAIs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

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[8] https://blog.ndepend.com/visual-studio-next-version/

[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aMGglYFhmIvctkmhztYfDwAAAIs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/05/github_copilot_complaints/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/03/gitpod_rebrands_as_ona/

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/03/jetbrains_resharper_update/

[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/29/github_deepens_ties_with_elon/

[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/