Microsoft has released its first preview of the Visual Studio 2026 IDE through the company’s new Insiders channel, which replaces the old Preview channel for early access to upcoming features. The new IDE offers deeper integration of the GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant, including a profiler agent that analyzes performance and suggests fixes.
Visual Studio 2026 Insiders, announced September 9, can be downloaded at visualstudio.microsoft.com/insiders/. In addition to AI “woven directly into the developer workflow,” Visual Studio 2026 features snappier performance and a modern design that makes the environment feel lighter and more focused, according to Microsoft.
Working alongside GitHub Copilot, the Profiler Agent in Visual Studio 2026 helps developers understand and fix performance issues without needing to be a profiling expert, according to release notes. The Profiler Agent can analyze CPU usage, memory allocations, and runtime behavior, along with surfacing performance bottlenecks, and suggest optimizations. Further, developers now can bring their own language models to Visual Studio Chat, while improved code search capabilities in Copilot Chat promise to give developers more relevant results.
