The Future of Visual Studio: Interactive Expert Panel | What’s Next for Visual Studio

What are you guys focusing on now and kind of the Q3 Q4 roadmap that you expect to to ship over the next year? >> Yeah, I mean I mean I mentioned one big one, right? Which is we will move to the Copilot SDK as being, you know, one of the primary ways that we try to make you know, close that gap and make things more consistent. The other thing it does is something else I I mentioned a little earlier, which is you know, we're we're focused on essentially making it possible to move between these surfaces very easily if you're using Copilot, right? So, that is also a pretty big focus. Now, I'm more at the fundamentals level, just Visual Studio in general, right? We continue to work on things like performance and, you know, stability. Um in order to enable some of the things that I mentioned, right? Like you will see you should see uh things like open folder become a lot more capable. Um and that can mean that for very For example, for very large, you know, repos, right? Or even multi-repos, you know, being able to open those in in if if you're having trouble like you don't have a solution that covers it all or you want to like open something broader, you'll have that option now in in in open folder. Um and part of that has to do with like you know, more of the the like we open folder right now, it does substantial amount of indexing to make things later faster. Um but you know, if you open something that has you know 10 million files in it, right? Then that indexing will peg your, you know, CPU for a good amount of time. So, we're allowing for more configuration in that area. Um we continue to invest in sort of trying to make the general UX and you know UI a lot more modern looking. The problem I always have when I say modern is that everybody's like definition of modern sort of changes on you know a pretty regular cadence. So we will keep up with that and you know if you don't feel like something looks particularly modern please please give feedback. Um we haven't fully converted every single piece of UX and UI within Visual Studio to you know the fluent sort of design. So we will continue to do that for places that are heavily used. Um and then uh we have I mean we talked a little bit about the idea of Visual Studio being used base for SSMS right? So there'll be some pretty substantial um improvements in SSMS in general. Um it sort of went one way for a while and then decided that actually building on top of Visual Studio was going to provide a richer more capable experience and so um they keep doing that and so we will do more work uh in that area. Um I mean there's some other things that I don't know if anyone to add or think so. >> Yeah I mean I think what we're focusing on is we're helping developers review code like the idea of like hey obviously code generation has got drastically if not exponentially cheaper now but the the actually the the risk of it not working is not necessarily changed if not that's become even harder. So you know we appreciate that like as you use AI to have it directly generate entire change sets right? You have an agent that goes away comes back with huge change sets or even if you're just working locally with a CLI you know you've got one of the worst problems right? We have to review someone else's code. And so we want to remake the experiences for that much better Visual Studio so you know you can more easily review code and in a sense to make sure it works for whatever system you've got, meet your requirements, stuff like that. So you can, you know, be much more confident about checking in that code and taking ownership of it. So both in the outer loop case where there's other people's code, like your traditional PR, but also just like, "Hey, I had an agent. It went away, burned several million tokens, and it's got 500 lines of code. What the hell is this?" So it tools that help with that, including fundamentals, which I think you've just seen in Git, like we added Git sub module support and work trees, stuff like that. So, you know, they all build to make a better experience. >> So you mentioned your improvements that you're working on with Copilot in Visual Studio. >> Yep. >> And I know that's probably a massive task. >> Uh it's not small, yeah. >> Yeah. So is that something you plan on doing like incremental improvements? You're going to chip away and get this feature updated to the SDK and then chip away and do that? Or are you going to do more of a big bang? >> Uh it's it's almost uh it's almost the third a third option, which is that we we did the a smaller version of it through agent the agent preview choice, right? So if you do agent preview, it's implemented as what we would call a responder, but it's basically a an agent itself, right? So you select uh it explicitly, and that is running on the SDK, and that will provide you an experience, you know, that should be, you know, much more uh like similar to what you'll see in the future when we move the entirety of it. Now, the entirety of it is what we call a harness, right? Which is like fundamentally underpins the entirety of all the other agents, all the other features in Visual Studio that are leveraging Copilot. That is more the big bang, right? Um big bang, I don't know if I love the term cuz it makes it sounds like it is exploding or something, but like uh you know, you know what? It it it should be um it should be better. Now, we will roll that out more carefully, right? Um but uh we we actually have the the we have the early versions of it available internally. So, if you are using internal, you know, like the the early early preview bits, right? Then, you'll see that much sooner than than others. And Taysser wants to add on to that. >> We have always been building with you guys, and so your input is very crucial to us, right? And so, whether it is the agent preview that folks were mentioning or even the new harness, you'll be able to test that as we are rolling it out, and we'll definitely keep an eye on the feedback, and you guys will be able to steer as we are improving things. So. >> Yeah, one thing so the agent the the nice thing about the agent preview right now is that, you know, you can switch between. So, if you if you, you know, agent preview isn't giving you good result, you can switch to agent and vice versa, right? With the harness, the way it currently works is you have to restart Visual Studio. That's an area we might see if we can investigate to try to make it better so that you could switch more easily between. Um but at the moment, it'll feel more like it's holistic as opposed to smaller. >> So, would it be fair to say, besides the obvious Copilot innovations and work being done there, as Visual Studio as a whole, would it be fair to say that you're really focusing on stabilizing, improving performance, and basically Visual Studio is kind of Do you believe it's reached like a critical mass of features to where you're not seeing necessarily the need to add more features to it, and possibly even even taking the path of SQL Server Management Studio, where maybe these big, you know, parts of the application Visual Studio that aren't used a lot maybe pulled out into a standalone reusing the same shell? >> Yeah. So, I'm sure Andy has So, this is going to be a like an opinionated answer, right? Like in the sense that I have my opinion and then other people will have their opinions, too, right? I I wouldn't No, I mean I don't think that we're done uh with Visual Studio in terms of the capabilities or features that are we're adding, right? Like we we're definitely focused more on the Copilot side uh at the moment. Um but in order to enable that, obviously, we have to invest in a bunch of other areas, right? Which are going to add capabilities that are good, right? Regardless of whether or not you happen to be using Copilot, right? Uh or any AI. I mean, I guess we didn't mention this, but I I should mention one other thing cuz it may be interesting to a bunch of people here is that we're also making it so that you can use bring your own key, right? Like so, basically, you don't you don't need to necessarily buy into GitHub Copilot if you don't want to, right? Like if you you for example, you work for the federal government, and that's not an option, right? But you could have a locally deployed to like, you know, Azure Foundry or something like that, right? Like an Azure local instance. Then that is will become an option. Um but no, I wouldn't I wouldn't say that we're We are looking for opportunities for improving the developer Now, the the thing is the developer workflow and experience, right? Is is changing. Um and so, we want to optimize for what that looks like with Visual Studio in the future. I mean, Visual Studio, like I said, I've been working on Visual Studio my basically my whole career, like 25-plus years, right? I hope that the folks in this room that have you know, that work with me, that haven't been here 25-plus years are working on it 25-plus years from now. Uh and for that to be true, we can't not invest in new workflows, new capabilities, new features, right? And so that is what I want to do. Um the set that we do invest in, right? That where is about I mean it's evolving, right? Like so there's some that I mentioned, right? That I think will be, you know, hopefully really useful. But the other thing that is again super useful is as you, you know, are doing development, you're like, "Ugh, I really wish that X, right?" Let us know. Uh that is an area that we will look at. >> Yeah, I mean just to double down on that last point, we continue to watch the new developer community where people like us at Epic Games House can upvote and make suggestions. And if you look at the releases, we consistently do release new developer community suggestions. So that's going to continue to be a thing. But obviously the the majority of work is like, "Hey, the developer workflow is changing and we need to adapt to that." But that's not to say like we're not going to continue to make improvements elsewhere at all. Just that our focus is really on, "Hey, embracing the moment."