The Azure Functions extension for VS Code now provides a redesigned Create New Project experience in public preview, featuring a rich, visual template gallery that replaces the multi-step Quick Pick wizard with a searchable, filterable view of project templates. Developers can browse templates by language and use case, search across template names, descriptions, and tags, and start from featured templates. A "Generate with Copilot" mode lets developers describe what they want to build and get a project scaffold generated for them.
The gallery is populated from a continuously updated, Microsoft-curated catalog of 75+ ready-to-deploy samples that have recently been refreshed across all supported languages, covering common scenarios such as HTTP APIs, event-driven processing, scheduled jobs, data integration, Durable Functions orchestrations, MCP servers, and AI and agent workloads.
The release also improves the Run Function App experience with smart, runtime-specific pre-start steps that automatically prepare the project — installing dependencies and building the app as needed — before launching the local runtime, so developers can go from create to running in a single click.