Microsoft has just released the October 2025 update for Visual Studio 2022 (v17.14). It brings with it a whole bunch of features, including improvements to GitHub Copilot agentic flows and models. The main update regarding Copilot is the availability of Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Haiku 4.5 in the chat window.
The Redmond giant hasn’t stopped there, though. There are now memories in Copilot that allow the AI to learn and apply project-specific coding standards and team best practices, making it consistent across sessions. Your preferences are intelligently detected and saved into one of three files: .editorconfig for coding standards, CONTRIBUTING.md for best practices, guidelines, and architectural standards, and README.md for high-level project information.
Copilot Chat also now includes built-in planning to guide large, multi-step tasks. When you give it a complex question, Copilot will automatically make a markdown plan file detailing a task list, the files it plans to edit, and the context for its approach. By default, these plan files are temporary and must be saved to the repository to reuse or share them.
This update also brings instruction files. Getting Copilot to respond how you want it to can be difficult, especially if you have different coding standards, best practices, or architectural patterns in other areas of your codebase. With instruction files, you can make Copilot project-aware and consistent across sessions. Check out Microsoft’s announcement for details on enabling this.
Next up, we have improvements for model control and chat management. New Azure Foundry integration provides an additional layer of control over the models used in GitHub Copilot Chat. There are also new chat commands: /clear clears the current chat conversation to start fresh, and /clearAll clears all old chat threads from history.
Lastly, Microsoft announced the Visual Studio Hub, a new central location for staying informed with access to the latest release notes, YouTube videos, social updates, and community discussions.
The new update should be offered automatically within Visual Studio 2022, or you can download it from the Visual Studio 2022 website.