Microsoft shipped the October update to Visual Studio 2026 on 27 October, and its two most practical additions both go after Git chores that eat developer time: comparing history with the present, and clearing merge conflicts.
The first is a new Compare with Working Tree command. Right-click any commit in the Git Repository window, from the history or the branch list, and Visual Studio shows every file that differs between that commit and the code on your disk today. That includes edits you have not committed yet. Mark Downie, the Principal Product Manager who wrote the announcement on the Visual Studio blog, pitches it for two jobs: reviewing a refactor that spans several commits, and finding out what has moved since the last version you knew was good.
The second feature targets a familiar annoyance. After a big merge, you often know before opening a single file that you want your side everywhere, or theirs. Until now, Visual Studio made you say so file by file. In the Git Changes window you can now select several conflicted files, a folder, or the whole repository root under Unmerged Changes, then choose “Keep All Current” or “Take All Incoming”. One click settles every conflict in the selection. The choice is blunt, so it suits generated files and lockfiles better than source where both sides made real edits.
Copilot gets a rebuilt chat. According to the Visual Studio blog, it now runs on the same Copilot SDK that powers the Copilot CLI and the GitHub Copilot app, and it covers both the question mode and the agent mode, plus the chat machinery beneath them. Microsoft promises agent workflows that need less back-and-forth, long sessions that make better use of prompt caching, and the same behavior across its Copilot products. The post offers no benchmarks or timings for any of that. You switch it on in the Copilot Chat page of the options dialog, then restart the IDE.
Hot Exit is the change most likely to save someone an afternoon. When you close Visual Studio, it keeps unsaved new files and unsaved edits to existing ones, then brings them back on the next launch, tabs and windows arranged as you left them. Undo history for saved files survives too, so Ctrl+Z still works. The setting is off by default. It lives on the general page under Projects and Solutions in the options dialog, worded as reopening unsaved documents when a solution loads, and nobody on a team will get it until they find that checkbox.
Two smaller changes round out the release. Ctrl+Shift+PgUp and Ctrl+Shift+PgDn now shift the current tab one slot left or right, or up and down with vertical tabs. Those keys take over from the old defaults of Edit.ViewTopExtend, along with Edit.ViewBottomExtend, so anyone who used those selection commands will need to rebind them. The Fonts and Colors page has also been rebuilt on Unified Settings, with search, category navigation, inline previews, and changes that sync to settings.json, which makes a theme easy to share across a team.
Nothing here is a headline feature on its own. Together they show where Microsoft is spending effort: fewer repeated clicks in Git, and an agent stack shared across its editor, command line and app. Teams on Visual Studio 2026 can take the update, but the two settings that matter most, the new chat and Hot Exit, stay dormant until someone turns them on, so a single person who flips both can report back before a wider rollout.
Reported by the Microsoft Visual Studio blog (devblogs.microsoft.com), written by Mark Downie, on 27 October 2026.
