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Visual Studio 2026–The Copilot Profiler Agent

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.

One feature that is really new and only available inside VS 2026 (at the moment of writing this post) is the new Copilot Profiler agent. The profiler agent should be of assistant in any of the following tasks:

  • Analyzing CPU usage, memory allocations, and runtime behavior

  • Surfacing bottlenecks in your code

  • Generate new BenchmarkDotNet benchmarks

  • Validate fixes with before/after metrics, all in a smooth guided loop

  • And more…

A good introduction of the profiler agent can be found here:

But of course, we want to try it ourselves…

Hello profiler!

I have an existing set of BenchmarkDotNet test that I use to evaluate the performance of some features I’m working on and also to avoid that any change negatively impacts our performance baseline.

Let’s see what suggestions the profiler agent brings to the table:


It first asks me to install some extra diagnosers to provide Visual Studio integration. We confirm to continue:

Unfortunately, it failed afterwards probably due to an incompatibility between the newly installed diagnoser and our used BenchmarkDotNet version.

After confirming that I had indeed the latest BenchmarkDotNet version installed and a few retries with the same result, I decided to go for the power option and restarted Visual Studio.

When I asked the same question to the profiler, this time it started a profiling session. Unfortunately it didn’t look at the benchmark test I was pointing to but instead started my application.

After stopping the profiling session, the results were analyzed by the profiling agent and I got some suggestions for improvements.

A strange thing I noticed that it mixed the feedback from the diagnostic session with a feedback about the code (this time looking at the benchmark test I was hoping he would run).

 

After doing one last attempt, I had the problem with the Diagnoser again. I’ll try to fix that first before I try this feature again…

Sidenote: The BenchmarkDotNet template

While evaluating the profiling agent I noticed that the BenchMarkDotNet project found its place among the available templates. Visual Studio scaffolds a fully configured project, complete with benchmark setup and diagnosers.

 

More information

Democratizing Performance: The Copilot Profiler Agent in Action on Real Code - Visual Studio Blog

(352) Copilot Profiler Agent - YouTube

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