We've upgraded to Visual Studio 2026 - is there much difference?

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We've upgraded to Visual Studio 2026 - is there much difference?
After waiting a couple of months for the main bugs to be ironed out, we've upgraded our web development to Visual Studio 2026. This blog considers the extent to which this has changed our lives (answer: not as much as we expected).

Posted by Andy Brown on 28 January 2026

In this blog

The look and feel has changed
Settings are in a different place
Code Intellisense is meant to have changed
Excluding files from search
Other changes
Recommendation for upgrade?

Visual Studio 2026 was released on 11th November 2025. You can see what Microsoft think of their new baby here (you'll need to scroll down to the November Update 18.0.0 release notes), but I thought it would be useful to record my impressions.

Just for context, I develop and maintain two internal and one external website at Wise Owl, with the legacy one using VB but the newer 2 using exclusively C# code. I've been an enthusiastic Visual Studio user way back to when it wasn't even called Visual Studio (remember Visual InterDev, anyone)?

The look and feel has changed

The first thing you notice about Visual Studio is that it looks different:

Apparently "Visual Studio now features a refreshed interface aligned with the Fluent UI design system".

It's true that VS 2026 does look different, but in my opinion it's not really noticeably better (or worse).

Settings are in a different place

When you choose Tools -> Options you now get taken to a much better Settings interface:

This looks much more modern.

Best of all, you can choose to edit the JSON containing your settings directly, which will be familiar to users of Visual Studio Code:

Select this option to switch to JSON mode.

I can now see all of the settings I've tweaked in one place:

This is really useful!

Code Intellisense is meant to have changed

This is probably the single thing which would change my development life the most - how well does Visual Studio finish my sentences for me?

A typical bit of Intellisense, saving me having to type this line of code in.

My experience is that there is a new and irritating half-second delay between typing something in and Intellisense appearing, which as a touch-typist is half a second too long for me to wait. I also haven't noticed any improvement in Intellisense offerings - if anything the opposite - but I would stress that this is just my experience.

Excluding files from search

Although I probably won't bother setting this up, I can see that it would be really useful:

Searching often throws up files you're not interested in - you can exclude these from your searches in settings.

Other changes

I said that I would concentrate on my experience of Visual Studio 2026 in day-to-day development, but it would be unfair not to mention the following changes which don't really affect me:

Area	Changes
Productivity	There are a host of productivity changes, including something called Adaptive Paste which Microsoft are clearly proud of (when you paste in code Visual Studio will modify it to suit the new context). I'm sure things like this are wonderful, but the truth is I'll rarely if ever use them.
Copilot	There are many ways in which Copilot can now help you, but I'm happy asking coding questions separately in the likes of ChatGPT (does this make me a dinosaur?), and I find Copilot's intrusions on my work ... intrusive.
Debugging	There are probably more changes in this area than any other, but I already have far more debugging tools than I can ever hope to use.
Sharing	As a single developer, the extensive changes to Git and GitHub don't really affect me (perhaps they should?).
C# 14	Visual Studio 2026 has full support for C# 14 and .NET 10, but I suspect I won't notice this.

Recommendation for upgrade?

If after reading the above you recognise a kindred spirit - someone who just wants to get things done as quickly and efficiently as possible - then I would say there's no real advantage to be gained from upgrading to Visual Studio 2026 other than the fact that Microsoft will stop nagging you to do so!

Some other pages relevant to this blog include:

You can also book hourly online consultancy for your time zone with one of our 7 expert trainers!

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The look and feel has changed

Settings are in a different place

Code Intellisense is meant to have changed

Excluding files from search

Other changes

Recommendation for upgrade?

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