Unpacking Visual Studio 2026: New Features, Bug Fixes, and What's Coming Next with Mads Kristensen

The Modern .NET Show

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Show Notes

"And the first feature we have that take advantage of this deep integration is the Profiler Agent. And this is absolutely bonkers. So you can simply go to the chat window in Visual Studio and you can ask…"— Mads Kristensen

Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Modern .NET Show; the premier .NET podcast, focusing entirely on the knowledge, tools, and frameworks that all .NET developers should have in their toolbox. I'm your host Jamie Taylor, bringing you conversations with the brightest minds in the .NET ecosystem.

Today, we're joined by Mads Kristensen to talk about all things IDEs, tooling, and the new functionality that Visual Studio 2026 (aka "Dev 18") includes and how it has the chance of greatly impacting your development practice, in a fantastic way!

"And we want to make sure that You know, we we do as many of those as we can. We want to remove those paper cuts, make you as happy as possible. And so if you look back at the last 12 months, we have of you know of all the bugs people have opened on us, we fixed almost 4500 user-reported bugs. That's 18 bugs that we fixed every single work day."— Mads Kristensen

Did you know that Mads was present for what many see as the inciting incident that lead to .NET being both open source and cross platform: when jQuery was bundled with ASP .NET Framework and Visual Studio..

We also took some time to talk about bug reports, the things that you and I can do to ensure that our bug reports are read, providing positive feedback, the Visual Studio teams' velocity, and some of the amazing new features in Visual Studio 2026 like the ... well, I'm getting ahead of myself. You'll have to listen in to the episode to find out what those features are.

It's also worth noting that I recorded this podcast with Mads back in late August 2025, which was way ahead of the public preview of Visual Studio 2026. Whilst we didn't talk about anything that was super secret, things might have changed between recording the episode and you listening in.

Before we jump in, a quick reminder: if The Modern .NET Show has become part of your learning journey, please consider supporting us through Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee. Every contribution helps us continue bringing you these in-depth conversations with industry experts. You'll find all the links in the show notes.

Anyway, without further ado, let's sit back, open up a terminal, type in `dotnet new podcast` and we'll dive into the core of Modern .NET.

Full Show Notes

The full show notes, including links to some of the things we discussed and a full transcription of this episode, can be found at: https://dotnetcore.show/season-8/unpacking-visual-studio-2026-new-features-bug-fixes-and-whats-coming-next-with-mads-kristensen/

Useful Links:

• BlogEngine .NET
• visualstudio.com
• Mads on X (formerly Twitter)
• the Visual Studio team on X
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• Music created by Mono Memory Music, licensed to RJJ Software for use in The Modern .NET Show
• Editing and post-production services for this episode were provided by MB Podcast Services

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You can support the show by making a monthly donation on the show's Patreon page at: https://www.patreon.com/TheDotNetCorePodcast.

Music created by Mono Memory Music, licensed to RJJ Software for use in The Modern .NET Show.

Editing and post-production services for this episode were provided by MB Podcast Services.