Although Visual Studio Code is a very useful lightweight code editor, it is actually vanilla Visual Studio that is Microsoft"s flagship integrated development environment (IDE). As such, Microsoft consistently releases updates for the software to facilitate its existing developer community, while trying to engage new customers. Now, the company has shared all the enhancements it made to the IDE in version 17.14, also referred to as the August 2025 update.
For starters, OpenAI"s latest GPT model, GPT-5 is now available in Visual Studio. It fits in quite well with the IDE since it is the company"s most advanced reasoning model to date with upgrades to coding capabilities, math, reasoning, and more. In addition, MCP servers are now supported in Visual Studio and you can install them easily in order to connect your AI models and agents to disparate data sources and systems in a seamless manner.
Furthermore, code search via Copilot Chat has become a lot smarter because it now utilizes a more advanced Remote Semantic Search algorithm instead of the traditional BM25, which relies a lot on keyword matching rather than semantic meaning.
Microsoft has made some other enhancements too. Users can now authenticate with GitHub Copilot via their Google Account, connect their own language models through API keys, leverage better debugging mechanisms in Unreal Engine, reduce Copilot interference in their development workflows, and take advantage of the fact that Copilot Chat now understands your Git History.
The Redmond tech firm has emphasized that many of the aforementioned enhancements as well as improvements in general are a result of community feedback. As such, it has encouraged developers to continue submitting feedback about existing features and make requests for new capabilities. If you"re interested in downloading the latest version of Visual Studio 2022, you can do so via the dedicated release notes page here.