Visual Studio 18.7 shipped the full pull request review cycle directly in the IDE. As of June 11, 2026, you can open a PR, read the diff, leave line comments, approve, and merge — all without touching a browser.
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What Changed
The new surface lives in the Git Repository window, Git Changes window, and Git menu. Once you open a PR, you get inline or side-by-side diffs, commit-by-commit browsing, or a multi-file summary view. Comments sync to GitHub or Azure DevOps in real time. You can reply to threads, resolve conversations, apply code suggestions directly, or ask Copilot to generate a fix suggestion on a specific comment.
The key workflow detail: you can review without checking out the branch. If you want to dig deeper, you can check it out from within the same surface. Multi-PR switching preserves your working state.
Both GitHub and Azure DevOps are supported — cloud and on-premises, though some on-prem users have reported sync issues that Microsoft is working through.
What’s Still Missing
The feature is GA, not preview. Stable enough to use daily. But the surface isn’t complete: comment filtering, a PR activity timeline, and a smoother checkout flow are listed as still in progress. Multi-repo workflows and notification-driven review entry points (opening a PR from an email link, for example) are also rough at the edges.
Why It Matters
The browser tab was the last mandatory context switch in a code review workflow that otherwise stayed in the IDE. You stopped mid-task, opened a diff in a different environment with no access to your local state, left a comment, and returned. Multiply that by however many reviews you do in a week.
The browser PR view didn’t go anywhere — it still exists and handles things the IDE surface doesn’t cover yet. But for IDE-centric developers on GitHub or Azure DevOps, the round-trip cost just dropped.
One thing worth calling out: the Copilot integration changes the review interaction model in a subtle way. Requesting a fix suggestion on a comment thread in-IDE is a different experience from switching to a chat window while reviewing in a browser. The AI is in the review loop, not adjacent to it. Whether that’s an improvement depends on how much ambient AI assistance you want during a review. But the option didn’t exist before.