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?