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Microsoft has published an updated roadmap for AI integration in Visual Studio as of November 2025, outlining experimental features, agent-driven workflows, and improvements aimed at making the IDE smarter and faster for developers. These items reflect active research and community feedback, not guaranteed release dates.
What Microsoft is testing in Visual Studio
The roadmap focuses on agentic experiences — AI assistants that can take actions inside the IDE. Microsoft is investigating several new agent types, including user-created custom agents, a test agent to automate testing tasks, and a debugger agent to help isolate and resolve bugs. There’s also work exploring concurrency so multiple Visual Studio Agents can run at the same time, enabling more complex parallel workflows.
Making chat and Agent Mode more useful
Expect iterative improvements to Agent Mode and the Chat interface based on community feedback. Planned upgrades include:
- Slash commands for quick prompt invocation and chat management.
- Global custom instructions so your preferences persist across sessions.
- Smarter tool-calling: dynamic tool invocation and thread-history summarization to keep longer conversations coherent.
- Better planning tools inside Chat, including an inline preview and making some planning views read-only to reduce accidental edits.
Deeper integration with MCP and enterprise controls
Microsoft aims to implement the full MCP (Model Connectivity Protocol) specification so teams can securely connect their entire development stack. Work items include improving sampling-window UX, optimizing performance and token usage for MCP servers, and giving organizations the ability to allowlist specific MCP endpoints for use in their repos. A unified MCP UI is also on the roadmap to simplify administration.
Model access, auto-routing, and GPT-5 Codex
One notable feature under evaluation is an "auto model" option that routes prompts to the most suitable model automatically — reducing manual switching and balancing quality with performance. Microsoft also plans to expand access to newer models, including offering GPT-5 Codex within Chat for higher-quality coding suggestions. The company is aware of model deprecations and intends to smooth transitions so users aren’t abruptly cut off when models are retired.
Keep in mind: Microsoft stresses these items are research and planning notes rather than immediate commitments. Many features will roll out gradually, and some may change or never ship depending on testing and feedback.
Source: neowin
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