Discovering Visual Studio 2026–Adaptive paste

Yes! The new Visual Studio 2026 edition is available in preview (now called Insiders). I'll take some time this week to walk through some of the features I like and maybe some of the rough edges I discover along the way.

Let’s be honest. Every developer copy and pastes other code. Typically after pasting there is some cleanup left to do; correcting styles, adapt to your naming conventions, fixing small errors. process often comes with extra steps. What if the pasted code is automatically adapted incorporating one or more of the following actions

Aligning syntax and styling with the document
Inferring parameter adjustments
Fixing minor errors
Supporting language translation, human and code-based
Completing patterns or filling in blanks

Wouldn’t that be great? Enter adaptive paste.

Adaptive paste

The adaptive paste UI appears when you do a regular paste (CTRL-V). Press the TAB key afterwards to get an Adaptive Paste suggestion.

You can also trigger Adaptive paste by using the (ALT-SHIFT-V) combination:

Remark: This feature is also available as part of the 17.14 update of Visual Studio 2022.

Let’s try a few scenario’s and see how the Adaptive paste handles it.

Code translation

Let’s take a piece of Python code and paste it in a C# file and see how it adapts the syntax, variable declarations, and idioms.

I take this simple Python method that checks if a number is prime number

and paste it into a PrimeService.cs C# class. Copilot rewrites the code to the following:

Maybe not perfect. But it does the trick... 1 point for Copilot!

Changing naming conventions

I tale some that uses a mix of naming conventions (camelCase, …) and paste it into a PascalCase project. Here is the example I use:

After some thinking, Copilot transforms it to the following:

Great! Another point for Copilot.

Test framework adaption

A third scenario I wanted to give a try was to take an MSTest unit test example and paste it into an XUnit project.

I copied the following example from Microsoft Learn about MSTest:

And pasted it in a C# XUnit test project

GitHub Copilot thinks a while but in the end no code was changed.

2 out of 3 points, that is not so bad….

First conclusions

These were only some simple scenario’s I could think of but they are a good indication on what it possible. It is certainly a great improvement and takes away some of the annoyances when doing copy/paste operations in your code base.

Nice!

More information

Effortless adjustments with an adaptive paste - Visual Studio Blog

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