The first preview (or 'Insiders') build of Visual Studio 2026 was made public this week.  With a 4 year gap from the last major release (2022), this is the longest wait we've had between major versions of Visual Studio.

As is typical for a major release of VS, the release notes detail a lot of extensive improvements to the IDE.  Most of the changes involve adding extra features to Copilot to enable more AI tooling integrated with the IDE.

Patrick Smacchia has a good analysis of the current state of MS's migration of VS to the newer .NET platform and away from .NET Framework.  Sensibly, they have been moving individual components over to netstandard so that they can eventually flick the switch over to .NET 10 (or whatever will be the latest .NET at the time).  It looks like they still have a long way to go, but it doesn't look like a small task.

Since adding support for Rider, NCrunch has been able to host its engine under newer versions of .NET, so I'm hopeful that when VS leaves .NET Framework the process of switching over should be simple for NCrunch.  However, for the time being, we're still on .NET Framework, which has made adding support for VS2026 much easier.  MS have also done a remarkable job with backwards compatibility with the first 2026 build.

Consequently, I'm happy to say that NCrunch now has full support for VS2026 just 4 days after it was released.  The v5.18 release includes a single item in the release notes: Visual Studio 2026 Support.  It's now available for download!