Visual Studio Code helps streamline the development of AI agents and intelligent applications. The following extensions are highly recommended for developers working with the Agent Framework in Python or .NET.
These extensions provide specific workflows for building, testing, and deploying AI agents and connecting to AI services.
| Extension | Why it's useful |
|---|---|
| AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code (Preview) | Essential for downloading and running local models (SLMs), testing prompts, and deploying models to Azure. |
| Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit | Streamlines the creation of agents for Microsoft 365, including Copilot extensions and Teams bots. |
| Azure AI Foundry | Provides integration with Azure AI Foundry for managing AI assets and connecting to cloud resources. |
- Polyglot Notebooks: The "Notebooks" extension for multi-language support in notebook form.
The standard stack for Python-based agent development.
- Python: The core extension for Python language support (debugging, linting, formatting).
- Pylance: Provides high-performance language support and type checking, which is critical when working with complex agent SDKs.
- Jupyter: Indispensable for interactive prototyping, testing agent chains, and visualizing data directly within VS Code.
The modern extension stack for C#-based agent development.
- C#: Baseline for C# developers.
- C# Dev Kit: The official extension for .NET development, offering a solution explorer, test management, and enhanced IntelliSense. (Does this need a VS Code license?)
Microsoft AI Tools Extension Pack Note: This is a GitHub repository, not an extension. This repository maintains a curated list of potentially useful extensions for AI developers. It is a great resource for discovering new tools as the ecosystem evolves.