Today (11/11) is the Visual Studio, AI and tools day at .NET Conf 2026. My summary of what was announced, based on the release notes and the official blog. I have not yet watched today's keynote, so I do not cite demos 👇
Channel videos (in Portuguese): V047 on YouTube and Short S071.
🧩 Visual Studio 18.12 and LTSC 18.11
- 18.12 is already on the Stable channel (11/10).
- LTSC 18.11 gets 2 years of support, until 11/14/2028, with .NET 10 LTS and MSVC 14.50 and 14.52 toolsets.
- For daily use, Stable remains the recommended channel, with monthly updates.
🤖 Copilot Chat on the Copilot SDK
- Since 18.12, Copilot Chat runs on the Microsoft Copilot SDK, the same one used by the CLI and VS Code.
- The .NET team tested 157 real C# tasks: the new engine solved up to 21 more, across all models.
- New features: subagents, steering in the middle of a task, /security-review and /rubber-duck (another model critiques the plan before acting).
- Plan mode and chat export are still missing.
🛠️ Debug and Git
- MCP debugger with conditional breakpoints and logpoints.
- Copilot resolves merge conflicts (Auto Resolve).
- Change Groups in PRs, to organize the review.
🌐 .NET sessions
- Blazor Server in .NET 11: static SSR with client-side validation and circuit pause and resume.
- MCP C# SDK: new protocol revision, with stateless servers.
- EF Core 11: approximate vector search and full-text search in SQL Server, plus FullJoin, MaxBy and MinBy.
- File-based apps: faster launch and references between apps.
- MAUI: DevFlow gives Copilot "eyes and hands" in the running app.
✅ What I would do this week
- Run Copilot Chat on 18.12 with /security-review on one of your PRs.
- Test the MCP debugger on a bug you already know.
- Replace a test script with a file-based app and measure the time.
Tomorrow (12/11) the community days start. Which of these updates goes into your workflow first?
#dotnet #csharp #dotnetconf #visualstudio #dotnet11
Original source: dotnetconf.net