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Discovering Visual Studio 2026 – Bring your own model

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.

A feature that exists for a while in VS Code but didn’t made it yet in Visual Studio, finally arrived in Visual Studio 2026. You are no longer limited to use any of the built-in models that Visual Studio supports, but you can now connect to your own language models.

Selecting a model

To select a different model, go to the models dropdown in the Copilot Chat window:

Click on the dropdown and choose Manage Models:

 

This will open up the Bring your own model window:

 

Here you can select a model from any of the available providers; Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI:

 

After entering your API key, you can select one or more models supported by the chosen provider:

 

Unfortunately, you don’t have the option yet to choose a local model through Ollama or another local model runner.

Maybe something to add in another update?

More information

Copilot Agent mode is GA- What has changed?

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