Visual Studio 2026 Released
Visual Studio 2026 (version 18.0) is now generally available! It includes a lot of new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements across the board. Here is a selection of what’s new for C++ developers, including new features and improvements:
- A refreshed IDE UI
- Support for Visual Studio 2022 extensions out of the box
- Seamless upgrade experience from an older version of Visual Studio
- Microsoft C++ (MSVC) Build Tools v14.50: Greater C++23 conformance and runtime performance improvements
- AddressSanitizer support for ARM64 targets (Preview)
- IDE productivity improvements:
- New keyboard shortcuts
- Syntax highlighting for C++ attributes
- Class View substring searches and performance improvements
- Generate preprocessed output
- Enhanced controls in the bottom margin, including viewing and setting file encoding
- File exclusion options in Quick Find and Find in Files
- GitHub Copilot Chat: improved chat experience and new context menu options
- C++ project system changes (MSBuild and CMake)
- New clang-tidy configuration options
- Set command line arguments for the debugger from the toolbar
- Mermaid chart rendering
- Podman support in Container Tools
- Git tools improvements
This blog post by Microsoft gives details on all of the above.
You can also read the broader announcement on the Visual Studio Blog for more details on changes that are non-C++-specific.
