Day two at a VS Live conference started at eight in the morning with a presentation from a Microsoft Visual Studio team called: The next generation of developer productivity with GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio. Yes, Visual Studio is playing catchup with VS Code and AI development, but they are really trying.
One of the key takeaway from this session for me is to really keep an eye on the MCP Servers and skills that I connect to Visual Studio or VS Code. Turns out that when you reach a certain level of enabled skills and even capabilities in one MCP Server not only the cost increases, but also the AI agents are getting confused as to which tools they should use and quality of the output declines.
The next session I picked was also from Microsoft and it was called: How the Visual Studio team uses AI internally. As you can see from the picture below there are usually five sessions to pick from that are happening at the same time. And picking the right one is key as sometimes the description doesn't live up to what is actually delivered during the session. And switching sessions after they start doesn't work great for me as important context from the beginning of the session is missing.
One of the interesting things that came out of this session is that Microsoft engineers seem to really love the plan mode, which suggests that they are fairly new to AI Agentic development in my opinion.
In the demos including this one I see the presenters use the latest Claude Opus LLM model in their GitHub Copilot. That's the most expensive model and usually an overkill and I like to use an auto mode for picking LLM models.
An interesting thing is that Visual Studio team is spending more time in code reviews than anything else.
Another useful suggestion from this presentation is to tell your agent to break down changes into commits that make sense. And something that would help our team is to connect Azure DevOps MCP Server and generate work items automatically based on code commits so that developers get credited for the work that they are actually doing.
At Microsoft Commons as you can see they have some art from employees displayed, I found it interesting.
The next session I was in was also from Microsoft and it was called: Fast Focus: 20 minute speed round - AI n Visual Studio. This was a really good and quick session that demonstrated how you can use AI in your debugging process. It focused on a Debugging Agent and confirming the issue then fixing it nd adding an automated test case for it.
It also demonstrated usage of the/savePrompt command to extract useful information from the session and creating an automated process for the future.
Since first fast focus session was a great success I stayed for the second fast focus session on the Cutting Edge AI called: Using Copilot to build Migrated Tools. This one was not presented by Microsoft.
Jason is a great presenter and had interesting things to say in his intro like things change very quickly now and what you are doing now is going to be completely different in three months from now. I can totally relate to that...
After that session it was time for the lunch. I went to the same restaurant inside the building. I did select a different bowl and a different shake this time. This time I selected Hawaii style pork bowl.
After lunch the next session was from Microsoft on application modernization using AI. I didn't even realize that there is a GitHub Copilot app, I think I am staying with Visual Studio Code and in some cases Visual Studio.
There is a special extension for VS Code modernization: GitHub Copilot Modernization. Another interesting solution is using YARP to proxy calls to the old app if new application can't handle the call yet.
The thing I noticed is that the best sessions tend to come earlier in the day and the last sessions of the day tend to be a lot less interesting. Like the session by Microsoft on building MCP Servers. And with that the second day of the VS Live conference has concluded.
