Visual Studio’s New MCP Features Aim to Deepen Copilot Context Awareness

Microsoft announced that Visual Studio will now support MCP prompts, resources, and sampling, bringing richer context from engineering stacks directly into the IDE. These enhancements are designed to upgrade the Copilot experience by enabling more intelligent, context-aware developer workflows.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Why Use MCP?

  Seamlessly integrate external tools and services to make your development workflow more intelligent and context-aware.

• MCP Resources & Templates

  Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets servers share files, database schemas, or app-specific info—each identified by a URI—so you can pull relevant context directly in the IDE.

  How to use: In chat, click +Reference → MCP Resource, choose a template, fill arguments, and add the resource.

• MCP Prompts & Prompt Templates

  Provide structured instructions tailored to your server’s content for sharper, task-specific responses.

  How to use: Click +Reference → Prompts → MCP Prompts to select and apply.

• MCP Sampling

  Enable advanced agentic behaviors where MCP servers can make nested LLM calls, unlocking multi-step, automated tasks—Visual Studio handles this automatically if your MCP supports it.

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