The Future of Visual Studio: Interactive Expert Panel | Keeping Pace with AI Development

The challenge that we see with AI in general is expectations for um getting more rapid in terms of being able to do things faster. And I've seen a lot of people in our organization that have shifted off of Visual Studio over to VS Code and to a you know, similar kinds of products because they were able to iterate quickly and get new capabilities out, new agents, custom agents, custom skills, all of those kinds of things uh very quickly. And Visual Studio, because of the amount of effort that it does take to get some of those kinds of things in place, took longer time to get get there. Uh just in terms of you know, looking at roadmap, how do we address some of those kinds of things to be able to stay competitive in this ever-evolving landscape, I guess. >> Yeah, I I I mean, we have a lot of eggs in the basket of the SDK. Uh now, the reason is because once we move to the SDK, right? Uh uh a lot of things will become consistent, right? So, where you put files for skills load I mean, this is like we have these perennial problems where your VS Code puts them in a particular place, you know, the CLI puts them in a different place, right? Visual Studio has the capability, but people don't know because we put it in yet another place, right? Um And then there are some capabilities that, you know, Visual Studio didn't have because like there was this choice of like, do we invest in that or do we invest in this other thing that we've seen a lot of uptake on? And we're not 100% sure if that other thing is going to have an uptake, right? Um and then we see something replace it. And so then it's it's kind of like this choice it's it's a really difficult thing. It's like, what do you do you want to be tip of the spear, but then you invest in some things that actually immediately get deprecated like a few months later? Or do you you know or do you do like a a follow? Right? Like where you you put them in if they've proven. And Visual Studio kind of because of the reasons that you mentioned tended to end up in the second place a bit, right? Like we led with some things but we you know for other things we we we ended up following. And that made it hard, right? Because other people like if you wanted to be the very tip then you know it was difficult to use Visual Studio for that. Um but I think with the SDK the goal here will be So one thing we did do with Visual Studio is we ship much much faster, right? Now whether or not you can ingest as fast as we're shipping that's a question uh you know left to each of you individually, right? Because uh it is not necessarily easy to update every day slash week, right? Um but our expectation is that we will take new versions of the SDK extremely often, right? When when we're talking about 2026 at at the tip, right? Um we should basically weekly, right? Um and so it should not be the case that there is broad capability difference between what you see in the CLI which will also use the SDK, a Copilot app which will also use the SDK, VS Code which will also use the SDK. Now the way it's expressed within each of the tools will differ, right? Um and so it is possible that you know we don't uh have all of the things expressed in exactly the same way or at the exact same time. So there may may still be some of that. We are betting on the SDK to help close that gap uh in terms of capability differences faster than we otherwise would. I mean and you know just from a pure engineering efficiency perspective it really it just didn't make very much sense to continue to have races between the CLI, VS Code, Visual Studio, the Copilot app, right? Like um it felt You know, we we actually did it initially very intentionally with the idea that like we don't know what's going to stick. We want each team, each product to kind of focus on their customer their customers, right? See what they need and and see how that evolves, right? But it does lead to this problem where oh well then now they have different capabilities and different locations for files and you know, different things that they focus on and and so we're trying to now you know, get back to a a single kind of source of truth. >> Yeah. And I think just to add to that and go back to the point we just talked about like a one of the challenges I think we're learning and hearing more and more about is that developers, you know, you're empowered often to install things I VS Code by yourself, right? It's a player user app, anyone can go out and get it. Whereas we find for many situations and organizations VS is centrally managed. Like there's a company portal or something like that and the update cadence is set centrally. And so, you know, that's also a challenge we do want to work on to reduce that friction and and explore ways to reduce that. >> Yeah, wanted to add one more egg to the basket of eggs that you know, we were talking about. So, you know, instead of you know, like consistency hopefully will will no longer be an issue, right? Once we move to the SDK and we'll focus our energy into differentiation, right? So, we'll focus on like what makes the AI experience unique to Visual Studio as a product, right? The workflows, the integration, you know, all of that stuff. And so, we will be unique in that perspective, but you guys will no longer hopefully be too worried about like oh, the other surfaces have that feature and we don't have that feature in VS, right? So. >> And yeah, and just to you know, like uh if you look at some of the things that we have in Visual Studio that aren't you know, in VS Code or the CLI today. Um Those things are really powerful. Uh so, if you haven't explored them, try them, right? Like so, this is like the profiler agent, right? The issue to resolution, the bugger agent, right? Like um those things are I don't know. They're fun uh to play with uh and they're very powerful at like diagnosing very difficult issues.