GitHub Copilot allows specialized, user-defined agents
Agents for the AI Copilot can now be customized for individual use cases. Microsoft is leading the way by offering specialized agents for C# and WinForms.
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User-defined agents (custom agents) can now be created for the AI service GitHub Copilot. Microsoft, GitHub's parent company, has already implemented this for its C# programming language and its .NET GUI toolkit, Windows Forms (WinForms). Among other things, the new agents are intended to help adhere to best practices. Other custom agents have already been created by GitHub partners such as Dynatrace, HashiCorp, Databricks, and JFrog.
Custom Agents for GitHub Copilot can be fed with information on team workflows, conventions, and individual requirements. They can then be further specialized through prompts, tool selection, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Both companies and teams or individual developers can create such an agent.
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Currently, custom agents can be used on GitHub.com and in the Copilot CLI. Visual Studio Code is planned to follow in the future. The VS Code Insiders program offers a first look.
AI Agents for C# and WinForms
Microsoft has already created custom agents for C# and WinForms: under the names C# Expert and WinForms Expert. The C# agent is designed to behave like a C# expert and create clean, well-designed, error-free, secure, readable, and maintainable code that follows .NET conventions. The WinForms expert analogously follows the design and coding principles of Windows Forms. Among other things, when creating new projects, it prefers the upcoming release .NET 10.0 as well as known, stable, and widely used NuGet packages in their latest stable major version (e.g., 2.x).
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Improved classes in .NET 10.0, Native AOT with Entity Framework Core 10.0, and more: .NET professionals will provide information on these topics at the online conference betterCode() .NET 10.0 on November 18, 2025. Subsequently, there will be six full-day workshops on topics such as C# 14.0, artificial intelligence, and web APIs.
Both agents are still experimental. To use them, developers download the Markdown files CSharpExpert.agent.md and WinFormsExpert.agent.md from the repository @github/awesome-copilot. They then add the files to the .github/agents folder in their repo.
Then the corresponding AI expert can be selected, for example, in the Insider program for Visual Studio Code via a dropdown menu:
(Image: Microsoft)
Further information on custom agents can be found in a GitHub blog post. Microsoft introduces the experimental C# and WinForms agents on its developer blog presents on its developer blog.
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