Microsoft has released the Copilot Studio extension for Visual Studio Code on the Visual Studio Marketplace. Copilot Studio is a graphical, low-code tool for building agents and agent flows.

The extension adds the ability to build and manage Copilot Studio agents from IDEs supporting Visual Studio Code. 

Microsoft Copilot Studio was launched at Microsoft Ignite in 2023 as a way to customize Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots and custom GPTs. It was included in Copilot for Microsoft 365. One advantage of Copilot Studio is its ability to connect to other data sources by using prebuilt or custom connectors. It doesn't require a lot of code, with the aim of being accessible even for users who don't have an extensive technical background.

However, the announcement of the latest release on the Microsoft Dev blog says that:

"As agents grow beyond a few topics and prompts, teams need the same development hygiene they use for apps: source control, pull requests, change history, and repeatable deployments. The VS Code extension brings that workflow to Copilot Studio so makers and developers can collaborate without losing governance or velocity."

Using the extension, developers can clone an agent to their local workspace, where they can work locally with the full context of their agent.

The tool lets you make changes to your agent components such as its topics, tools, triggers, settings and knowledge references using a structured agent definition format and your existing VS Code workflow.

The extension also provides IDE help like syntax highlighting and IntelliSense-style completion.  

Once the changes are complete, there's a review option that developers can use to preview what changed, compare cloud vs local, and resolve conflicts before they apply the updates. Once the review is complete, the changes can be applied back to Copilot Studio to test the behavior, then deploy using the processes the team uses such as standard Git workflows and automated deployment processes.

The new toolbox is available now. 

More Information

Copilot VSCode Extension On Marketplace

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GitHub Copilot Adds VSCode Agent Mode

Microsoft Adds Copilot Key To Windows 

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