Jesse Liberty

In the past short while, we’ve seen the release of Visual Studio 2026 and iOS-26. They both have great improvements, though if I had to choose, the one that is making the biggest impact on me is, of course, Visual Studio. And there, the biggest improvement is performance.

You know how real estate people say that the three most important things in selling a house are location, location, location. Well, for me, the three most important things in an IDE are performance, performance and, oh yeah, performance.

A couple years ago I was frustrated by the slowness of the code-build-debug-repeat cycle. Loading Visual Studio, and especially building the project had terrible bursts of slow. I went out and bought a powerhouse desktop with 64GB of memory and 24 Core. At the time, that was about as big a box as I could afford. The impact on Rebuild All… nada. I couldn’t perceive much difference at all.

But now, Visual Studio appears to be taking advantage of the memory, and that, combined with other optomizations, makes it scream. I talked with Mads Kristensen (podcast / video) about 2026 and this was one of the things we focused on.

Mads actually focuses on three big improvements in VS2026: performance, appearance (did you know there are about 4,000 icons in VS!?), and deep CoPilot integration.

Deep CoPilot integration is one of those features whose true benefit emerges over time. One key feature is that CoPilot can now know a lot more about your entire project, allowing it to do a lot of work for you (under your supervision, of course). Add MCP (which, essentially, allows you to add expert AI on a given context) and boom! CoPilot really does become a smart assistant.

For more on CoPilot agents and MCP see my interview of Scott Hunter (podcast / video). Also, check out my podcast with Jeff Fritz.

iOS 26

iOS26 is much prettier than it was, and has a number of cool new features. My favorite is Hold Assist. It lets your iPhone wait on hold for you and alerts you when a person picks up. No more listening to elevator music…

To use it, make your call as you usually do. If you are put on hold (or get an automated message), wait a few seconds and your iPhone will prompt you: “Hold this call?” If you tap Hold, you can leave that screen and use your phone to do other things. When a human picks up on the other end, you are notified and the call is connected. (Note, if you miss the Hold This Call prompt, you can tap More -> Hold Assist from the in-call menu.)

iOS also offers Call Screening. This asks unknown callers who they are and what they want before your phone rings. You can then decide whether or not to take the call. You have a lot of control over this feature and you can integrate it with Focus.

What else? There are a ton of small features, one I particularly like is the ability to take simple polls in messages. What time should we talk? 6pm, 6:30pm, 7pm.

CoPilot says “This update isn’t just a facelift—it’s a full-on personality upgrade for your iPhone.” I agree.