Visual Studio 2019's Quiet Build 2021 Win: Git and GitHub Actions Baked In
A look at the Visual Studio 2019 productivity update from Microsoft Build 2021 and why its Git and container tooling matters more than the AI headlines.
Microsoft Build wrapped up last week, and while the keynote oxygen went to AI-assisted coding demos and the low-code Power Platform push, the update that’s actually going to change my day-to-day is a lot less flashy: a Visual Studio 2019 refresh focused squarely on developer productivity.
The headline piece is deeper built-in Git tooling. Visual Studio has had Git support for a while, but this update pushes it further into the core workflow rather than treating it as a bolted-on panel. If you’ve spent years shelling out to git or context-switching to a separate client for anything beyond a basic commit-and-push, that friction is exactly what Microsoft seems to be targeting here.
The feature I’m most interested in trying is the ability to create GitHub Actions workflows directly from the IDE. Anyone who’s hand-written YAML for a CI pipeline knows how easy it is to get indentation or trigger syntax wrong on the first few tries, then shuffle back and forth between docs and the actual file. Scaffolding a workflow from inside Visual Studio, with the IDE presumably filling in sensible defaults for your project type, should cut a lot of that trial-and-error out. It’s a small thing, but small things compound — this is the kind of feature you don’t notice until you’re missing it on a machine without it.
Containers and Azure get closer too
The other half of the update is improved container tooling, with new Azure integrations aimed at .NET and C++ developers specifically. Containerized development has become the default rather than the exception for a lot of teams, and the previous experience of juggling Dockerfiles, docker-compose, and Azure deployment configs across separate tools always felt like it belonged to an earlier era of tooling. Tightening that loop inside the IDE — build, test in a container, push to Azure — without leaving Visual Studio is a reasonable bet on where day-to-day workflows are heading.
None of this is as exciting to write about as an AI pair programmer, and that’s sort of the point. Build 2021’s biggest announcements are going to take months or years to actually land in most developers’ workflows, if they land at all in their current form. Meanwhile, better Git integration and one-click Actions workflows are things you can use this week. I’d argue that’s the more honest measure of a developer conference: not how many people say “wow” during the keynote, but how many fewer times you have to alt-tab out of your editor next Monday.
It’s also a useful reminder that Visual Studio 2019, despite Visual Studio 2022 previews already floating around, isn’t being left to coast. Microsoft clearly still sees enough of its user base on 2019 to justify meaningful productivity investment there rather than saving everything for the next major version. For teams not ready to jump to a preview release, that’s good news — you get real improvements without having to gamble on pre-release stability.