Visual Studio 2022 17.13 Release Notes Feature List

The Visual Studio 2022 team has brought out a major release on February 11, 2025. You will need to firstly update to 17.12.5 and then the major release of 17.13.0 will be avilable as an update straight from Visual Studio 2022 IDE. I have listed the major features of 17.12 here. 

There has been a lot of updates to the GitHib Copilot functionality, and it feels like Microsoft are all-in to developing this feature of their development suite. Microsoft are offering a free version of Microsoft CoPilot however I would just be warned that your code is used to train their main model and may appear in public results, so my advice would be to only use this for personal and hobby projects, and not with commercial IP.

Activate GitHub Copilot Free and unlock this AI feature, plus many more. No trial. No credit card. Just your GitHub account. Get Copilot Free.

GitHub Copilot Free gives you:
✅ 2,000 code completions per month
✅ 50 chat messages per month

There have been a number of enhancements to the CoPilot plugin for Visual Studio:

Code Referencing for GitHub Copilot Completions

This new functionality offers developers greater transparency on their code completions (or gray text) by providing detailed information on any public code matches found. When you accept a completion that matches code in a public GitHub repository for the first time in your solution, a toast notification will appear on the bottom right of your editor.

Leverage vision in Copilot Chat

I haven't seen this yet, as apparently Microsoft are rolling it out gradually as it's still in preview. You will be able to share pictures of UI, Error Messages, or other programming related pictures and the Copilot Model will analyse it and give response.

GitHub Copilot shortcuts

I should probably remember shortcuts more, but 4 more keyboard shortcuts have been added to the tool.

• New thread: Ctrl+N
• Previous thread: Ctrl+PgDown
• Next thread: Ctrl+PgUp
• Expand and focus thread drop-down: Ctrl+Shift+T

Slash command expansions

Slash commands expand out into their natural language counterparts as the user types, including pulling in any active context they'll use and displaying that in the user's prompt before they send it.

Use GitHub Copilot Edits across files

I tried this out, and for a basic task it's pretty good, it broke down the tasks, and even managed to inject my existing newsService into the new razor component.

Meet GitHub Copilot Free

Copilot Free is now available. You get 2,000 code completions and 50 chat requests per month at no cost, all seamlessly integrated into Visual Studio.

Function Calling in GitHub Copilot

Copilot used to work on the context of open files, but now it works on the following 5 contexts.

• Your current file
• Open or related files
• Your entire codebase
• Debugger data (locals, call stacks, exceptions etc.)
• Visual Studio tools

4 LLM Processors

This has been around a while but it might be worth sharing that CoPilot has 3 new LLM's, o1, o1-mini and Claude 3.5. Claude was launched on Jun 21, 2024. Claude 3.5 Sonnet can understand nuanced instructions and context, recognize and correct its own mistakes, and can create sophisticated analysis and insights from complex data. 

AI-Enhanced Search

By using the @VS tag in the Copilot chat window, or by using the Feature Search Ctrl+Q you can perform a feature search, that will help you get the most out of Visual Studio.

Release History