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The MSVC Build Tools Preview is updated regularly with the latest features and fixes from the MSVC development team. This post covers the last month's updates of the Preview build tools, currently targeting the v14.53 release. This encompasses changes across the compiler frontend, backend, linker, standard library, and related tools. Although you can acquire the MSVC Build Tools Preview through either the Visual Studio 2026 Stable Channel or Visual Studio 2026 Insiders Channel , Insiders gets MSVC Preview updates more frequently. To check if it's installed simply make sure one or both of these components ar...
Contributors: Justin Stoecker, Sheil Kumar Overview One of the biggest challenges in building AI/ML platform stacks for mobile, client, or server is creating a machine learning (ML) compiler that is both scalable yet performant. A common approach is to build specialized compilers for specific AI hardware, frameworks, or workload types. For example, independent hardware vendors (IHVs) provide their own frameworks to deploy models on their hardware, and PyTorch includes torch.compile as a framework-specific compiler. Other ML compiler efforts include MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation), which also ...
Today we're sharing the transition plan from Phi Silica to Aion Instruct, Microsoft's latest on-device language model for Windows. Aion Instruct will begin rolling out to CP+ devices through the Windows Insider Program in late November, with full Windows Retail availability targeted for late January. We're also expanding Aion Instruct to supported GPUs, bringing local language model capabilities to a broader range of Windows devices. Microsoft Aion Instruct is designed to power fast, responsive language model experiences directly on your device. This transition gives Windows and Microsoft applications a newer...
Remove the need to have to type out the name of the helper.
The new Community Skills Feature. Bring Your Expertise to Git-Ape Git-Ape’s community skills open the framework to the people who know the work best. Platform teams, partners, and specialists can turn their expertise into repeatable procedures that Git-Ape can discover and use—extending its capabilities without rebuilding the agent workflow from scratch. The opportunity isn’t just to share a better prompt. It’s to bring your own expertise to Git-Ape’s framework: a migration assessment, a SaaS onboarding process, or a specialist operational workflow. Skills provide the instructions, ...
Introduction We are excited to announce that C++ Dynamic Debugging is now generally available in all Visual Studio 2026 channels and the Microsoft C++ (MSVC) Build Tools version 14.52. In the traditional workflow for games or large applications, switching to a debug build gives you access to debug symbols at the expense of performance. In contrast, when you debug optimized or release builds, you’ll often encounter variables that are “optimized away” and find it difficult to step reliably through the code you want to inspect. With C++ Dynamic Debugging, you get the best of both worlds. You can inspect local...
Additional Contributors: Justin Stoecker, Sheil Kumar Overview One of the biggest challenges in building AI/ML platform stacks for mobile, client, or server is creating a machine learning (ML) compiler that is both scalable yet performant. A common approach is to build specialized compilers for specific AI hardware, frameworks, or workload types. For example, independent hardware vendors (IHVs) provide their own frameworks to deploy models on their hardware, and PyTorch includes torch.compile as a framework-specific compiler. Other ML compiler efforts include MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation), whic...
I was talking with a developer recently about a project his team was working on. They'd built an application, connected their data sources, and had everything in working order. Then came another request from management: Could they add a dashboard within the app so users could actually see what was happening with all that data? As we talked, the developer explained what that really meant. More infrastructure, more queries, more charts, additional reporting functionality, and another set of features to build, test and maintain. And all of this would take valuable time to produce. Sound familiar? It's a ...
The <CODE>co_await</CODE> operator takes only one parameter, but it can be a big parameter.
I see three agentic stories shaping SQL’s future. Here’s how DP-800 connects the pieces and helps you build the skills to put SQL’s AI capabilities to work.
Use harness.AgentConfig to configure task lists, file memory, skills, approvals, conversation history, and tracing for agents written in Go.
Azure Content Understanding now supports the GPT-5.6, GPT-6, and GPT-6.1 model families, giving you more choices for document, text, speech, and video workflows. This adds to the existing set of supported models like the GPT-5 series. To help customers understand how to use this expanded set of options, we're updating our model recommendations and sharing the evaluation data behind them. In our GPT-5 model-selection guide, we described model selection as a mixing board: adjust quality and cost for each workload. The new models add range to those controls. Not every workload needs to be set to maximum, so w...
Whether your team hosts its own AI models, you have an API key from a model provider, or you want to experiment with a model running on your machine, Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) lets you use those models without leaving Visual Studio. BYOM is now generally available in Visual Studio 18.12. Since the August Preview, your feedback has shaped improvements for team deployments, enterprise networks, and personal projects. This release brings multiple configurations