Microsoft has announced the general release of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.14, an update of the company’s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) that adds support for agent mode and other AI-assisted development features from GitHub Copilot.
Released May 13, Visual Studio 2022 version 17.14 can be downloaded from visualstudio.microsoft.com. The 17.14 release previews GitHub Copilot agent mode to “supercharge” the AI-assisted development experience, Microsoft said. With agent mode, developers chat with Visual Studio using natural language to instruct it to complete multi-step, complex coding tasks autonomously. The agent understands the code base and can fix errors, suggest and execute terminal commands, and analyze runtime errors until a task is complete, Microsoft said. Agent mode is available in public preview for all users of Visual Studio 17.14.
Visual Studio 17.14 also adds Next Edit Suggestions (NES), whereby GitHub Copilot predicts the next edit in the current file based on previous edits, and AI-powered doc comment generation for C++ and C# functions. The release also adds support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), also preview. An open-source protocol created by Anthropic, MCP provides the GitHub Copilot agent with structured access to data, tools, and resources.
