Mads Kristensen: Visual Studio 2026 - Episode 367

Mads is a Principal Product Manager on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft, where he champions developer productivity, performance, and extensibility. With a deep passion for streamlining the development experience, Mads has created dozens of widely used Visual Studio extensions — including Web Essentials, File Nesting, and Markdown Editor v2 — and maintains the Extensibility Essentials toolkit to empower other developers to build better tools. Mads brings over a decade of experience in web development on the Microsoft platform. He is also the founder of SchemaStore.org and a home automation enthusiast. Known for his engaging presentations and hands-on insights, Mads is a frequent speaker at developer conferences worldwide. He lives in the Pacific Northwest and his mission is simple: to make Visual Studio the most delightful development environment on the planet.

Topics of Discussion:

[2:38] More about Mads' career journey at Microsoft.

[5:14] The new and improved Visual Studio.

[7:44] Backwards compatibility is a key feature — .NET solutions will still work across different Visual Studio versions.

[8:55] How Microsoft's strategy differentiates between Visual Studio and VS Code.

[10:42] Visual Studio is the premier development environment for .NET and C# on Windows, offering the most comprehensive and optimized experience. While VS Code can handle .NET development, it's not as feature-rich or performant as the full Visual Studio.

[12:58] Visual Studio has moved to a monthly release cadence to be more competitive with VS Code's frequent updates.

[13:48] Deep AI integration in Visual Studio allows for context-aware assistance, including a new profiler agent that can help optimize code performance.

[23:53] Compilation performance is improved in Visual Studio 2026.

[26:35] The new profiler agent can be invoked through Copilot chat, running benchmarks and suggesting performance improvements scientifically.

[30:30] Developers can create custom MCP servers to integrate private systems and databases with AI tools using a project template.

[35:39] The AI coding agent in Visual Studio can work autonomously or with developer supervision, creating pull requests or working alongside the developer.

[39:11] Visual Studio's Copilot can be used as a companion to bounce ideas off, helping with architectural decisions and new feature explorations.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Clear Measure Way

Architect Forum

Software Engineer Forum

Mads Kristensen on LinkedIn

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