Microsoft is focusing on long-term stability and more flexible developer tooling with its new “AI-native” Visual Studio 2026 IDE and .NET 10.
These new releases are aimed at two main business goals: first, improving developer productivity with AI help, and second, embedding new AI and security features directly into the applications themselves.
AI tools in the IDE, security in .NET 10
Visual Studio 2026, to the surprise of no-one, is described as “AI-native”. What this means in practice is that AI tools are woven directly into existing developer workflows, not bolted on the side.
A practical example is the new Profiler Copilot Agent. This tool helps developers by analysing CPU usage and memory allocations to find bottlenecks and suggest optimisations.
“The Profiler Agent in Visual Studio 2026 immediately highlighted the bottlenecks and guided me to faster, cleaner performance – like having a built-in performance coach,” noted Roberto Perez, Senior Global Solutions Architect at Redis.
This same assistance extends to debugging, where a new agent can automatically investigate failing unit tests, form hypotheses about the cause, and iteratively apply fixes to validate a solution.
Beyond the developer’s environment, .NET 10 provides the infrastructure for building more sophisticated AI systems directly into applications.
The new Microsoft Agent Framework unifies the concepts from Semantic Kernel and AutoGen, allowing developers to build and orchestrate systems of multiple AI agents. This framework supports various patterns, from simple sequential workflows – where one agent’s output feeds the next – to concurrent and group-chat models where agents collaborate.
For organisations wary of vendor lock-in, the Microsoft.Extensions.AI libraries provide unified abstractions, like the IChatClient interface. This allows code to target different AI providers – such as OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, or even local models via Ollama – using a consistent API, making back-end changes possible without a full code rewrite.
As quantum computing advances, it poses a threat to current encryption standards. .NET 10 helps future-proof applications by adding support for quantum-resistant algorithms like ML-DSA and ML-KEM, particularly for Windows cryptography APIs. This is paired with more immediate security needs, like the inclusion of passkey (WebAuthn/FIDO2) support in ASP.NET Core Identity.
Why decoupling the Visual Studio 2026 IDE matters
Microsoft has decoupled the Visual Studio IDE from its build tools. In the past, upgrading the IDE often forced a corresponding upgrade of the .NET or C++ compilers, creating a barrier to adoption for teams managing stable production environments.
By decoupling, developers can adopt VS 2026 to gain its performance and AI-assistant benefits immediately, whilst their build pipelines remain unchanged.
This separation makes adoption a much simpler cost-benefit call. The new IDE promises a faster experience, backed by internal metrics showing large solution load times dropping from 14.7 seconds in VS 2022 to 8.3 seconds in VS 2026. More importantly for daily use, the time the UI thread is blocked during a solution load has been cut by more than half, from 7.8 to 3.4 seconds.
Compatibility, another huge enterprise concern, has also been tackled. Visual Studio 2026 maintains full compatibility with projects and the more than 4,000 extensions from Visual Studio 2022.
For teams that are ready to make the jump to the new .NET 10 platform, GitHub Copilot is being framed as a migration assistant. The tool is designed to help modernise existing applications by guiding developers through breaking changes, suggesting modern API replacements, and refactoring code to use new language features.
See also: AI is changing what it means to be a software engineer
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