Visual Studio finally gets long-awaited feature that developers will love

A major Visual Studio upgrade removes a familiar pain point for developers, bringing the ability to review PRs directly in the IDE.

Visual Studio Code is Microsoft's popular, lightweight, open-source code editor, it is actually Visual Studio that is the company's flagship integrated development environment (IDE). Although the IDE already offers a boatload of useful features for developers, Microsoft has finally introduced a long-requested capability that will be loved by many.

While developers have already been able to create Git pull requests (PRs) directly within Visual Studio for the past couple of years, it had not been possible to review a PR without switching to the browser, until now. Microsoft revealed in December 2025 that it is working on UX that enables developers to do just that, and fast-forward to June 2026, and Visual Studio finally has native capabilities to open and inspect a PR, discuss feedback, and wrap up the review, all without switching to the browser. This integration works for both GitHub and Azure DevOps (including on-prem).

Developers have access to multiple surfaces to open a PR, including Git Repository, Git Changes, and the Git menu in Visual Studio. Once you open a PR, all the important details will be immediately visible to you, from where you can navigate to various levels of granularity and branch states, depending on the reviews that you are engaged in.

As you would expect, you also get a diff view that enables you to see code changes inline or side-by-side in a separate panel. You can also review commit-by-commit. Additionally, this UX fosters collaboration as you can leave comments, reply to threads, and resolve conversations easily. Naturally, you can also leverage Copilot to apply a code suggestion to fix a potential issue. When you are done, you have the ability to approve, complete, and merge the PR.

This is a pretty major feature as it has been requested heavily for the past few years. You can try it out in Visual Studio 2026 version 18.7, made available here recently. Microsoft plans to enhance this experience further in future releases with comment filtering, a timeline of PR activity, and more.