Amazon Q Developer is now generally available (GA) in the Visual Studio IDE

Posted on: Jul 3, 2024

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. launches the general availability of Amazon Q Developer in the Visual Studio IDE, available as part of the AWS Toolkit extension. You can now chat with Amazon Q about your project and ask Amazon Q to scan your project for security vulnerabilities.

Amazon Q Developer helps simplify the software development lifecycle by answering questions about technical topics, generating code, and explaining code. You can ask Amazon Q to answer questions such as “How do I debug issues with my Lambda functions locally before deploying to AWS?”. You can also request Amazon Q to generate code with prompts like “Generate test cases for [function name]”, where you reference a function name in an open file.

Amazon Q Developer can also keep your software secure by highlighting security vulnerabilities. You can click “Run Security Scan” from the margin menu, which will return with a list of vulnerabilities. Currently, security scans only support C#.

You can ask Amazon Q questions, update your code, and initiate actions with quick commands all from the Amazon Q chat panel in your IDE. When you ask Amazon Q a question, it uses the current file that is open in your IDE as context, including the programming language and the file path.

To get started, download the AWS Toolkit with Amazon Q, a free extension for Visual Studio 2022. To learn more, please visit our documentation.