Visual Studio Code 1.108: Import profiles via drag & drop
The first release of the year experiments with Agent Skills, simplifies profile importing, and clears thousands of open issues.
(Image: Proxima Studio/Shutterstock.com)
Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.108. Traditionally, Microsoft uses December for cleanup rather than a regular release, but this year there are apparently twelve instead of eleven releases. The VS Code developers have maintained the tradition of cleaning up issues and pull requests in December; around 6,000 of them were closed, and in addition, some feature updates have been incorporated into the December update.
Import profiles via drag & drop
It is now possible to drag and drop setting profiles from a .code-profile file into VS Code, similar to how a .code-workspace file opens a workspace. This opens the profile editor, which shows a preview and allows importing the profile. This is intended to simplify sharing profiles with team members or quickly setting up a new environment.
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Specialized skills for the AI agent
As an experimental feature, Agent Skills can be used in GitHub Copilot. This allows developers to teach the AI agent new capabilities and, for example, feed it domain-specific knowledge. Agent Skills consist of folders with instructions, scripts, and resources that GitHub Copilot can load as needed. They are an open standard and were originally developed by the company Anthropic.
According to Microsoft, the advantages include the combinability of multiple skills for creating complex workflows, the ability to specialize for domain-specific tasks without repetitive context, and the efficient loading of only relevant content. The skills can also avoid repetition, as they can be used across all conversations.
Creating and using agent skills is covered in detail by the VS Code documentation. It also discusses the differences between agent skills and VS Code-specific custom instructions.
New features in Agent Sessions and Chat View
The Agent Sessions view has been revised: it now offers keyboard access to actions such as “Archive,” “Read State,” and “Open Session,” displays information about changed files and associated pull requests for a session, and can archive multiple sessions at once from the new group sections.
(Image:Â Microsoft)
There are also new features in the chat. Among other things, previous chat sessions are no longer automatically restored when VS Code is restarted. However, previous chat sessions can be recalled from the Agent Sessions control. This new behavior can be adjusted in the setting chat.viewRestorePreviousSession.
Housekeeping in December
As part of the annual December housekeeping, the VS Code development team closed 5951 open issues and pull requests this time. An additional 1203 issues were triaged, so they are no longer listed under “Unknown Type.”
(Image:Â Microsoft)
All further information on the new features in VS Code 1.108 is shared by the development team in the announcement.
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