What’s New in 2.6.0

Everything added since 2.5.0. Full release history is on the GitHub Releases page.

Containerize and deploy from Copilot Chat

Five Containerization Assist skills now ship inside the extension and are available in Copilot Chat as soon as it is installed — no MCP server to register, no second extension, no feature flag:

  • analyze-repo works out your workspace’s language, framework, and what it needs to be containerized.
  • generate-dockerfile writes a Dockerfile based on that analysis.
  • fix-dockerfile checks a Dockerfile you already have and repairs it.
  • generate-k8s-manifests produces a deployment, service, and configmap with production-safe defaults.
  • deploy-to-aks runs the whole loop — analyze, generate, build, push, apply, verify — against a cluster.

These complement the existing command- and panel-driven Container Assist flows rather than replacing them, so you can stay in chat when the work is exploratory and switch to the panels when it isn’t.

See Containerization Assist Skills for Copilot Chat (Preview).

Kickstart now works in Azure Cloud Shell

Kickstart assumed a local Docker daemon, which Cloud Shell does not have. In Cloud Shell it would either stall on a build it could not run or report a check it had never actually performed.

  • Images are always built with az acr build, server-side on ACR’s remote task builders. There is one build path, so the image that gets validated is the image that gets deployed.
  • Your entry point is verified before deployment by reconciling the Dockerfile’s final-stage COPY/ADD destinations with WORKDIR and CMD/ENTRYPOINT; an unresolved entry point fails validation before a cluster even exists.
  • Deployment Safeguards review covers the full policy set, so the review phase no longer passes manifests that the cluster would reject.

See Kickstart Agent for AKS Automatic (Preview).

Documentation you can trust

The docs had drifted from the extension. This release realigns them and adds checks so they stay aligned.

  • Commands, settings, and pinned tool versions are now generated from package.json, so the reference cannot go stale without CI noticing.
  • Menu paths, navigation, and cross-page links are corrected — the Development page was silently rendering as an empty stub, and three pages under docs/ were stale forks of their published counterparts. The forks are gone; docs/book/src/ is the single source of truth.
  • Factual errors are fixed and stale screenshots removed. Commands that were never reachable are no longer documented as if they were, commands that existed but were undocumented now are, and pinned versions are stated rather than implied.
  • npm run docs:check and npm run docs:reference:check catch menu/orphan and generated-reference drift when run, but are not currently wired into CI.

See Reference and Development.

Compatibility

  • The minimum supported VS Code version is now 1.125.0. On older versions the extension will not install or update. Update VS Code before upgrading.

Under the hood

  • Archive extraction no longer depends on decompress. That package is unmaintained and pulled in a large transitive tree; downloads of the pinned CLIs now use targeted extraction instead.
  • Azure SDK clients moved to their current majors — arm-resources 8, arm-resources-subscriptions 3, arm-monitor 8, arm-compute 25, and arm-resourcegraph 5.0.0 GA — along with the usual round of dependency updates across the extension and webview.
  • The stale 1ES pipeline definition was removed from .github/workflows; signed publishing runs from the internal pipeline only.

Thanks

Thanks to @benjaminbob21, @bosesuneha, @davidgamero, and @Tatsinnit for contributions, testing, and reviews.

Where to go next