ContextRelay for Visual Studio is a Visual Studio (2022 / 2026) extension that surfaces relevant Microsoft 365 context (Exchange Mail, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Planner, and Microsoft To Do) in a tool window while you design and code.
It ports the feature set of the VS Code extension ContextRelay to the Visual Studio platform, and can share pinned snippets, chat history, and handoff-document pointers with the VS Code version on the same machine.
- Plain Microsoft 365 Copilot chat — input without a slash command starts or continues a Microsoft 365 Copilot conversation without implicit ContextRelay search context.
- Explicit source search across Exchange Mail, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Planner/To Do, and connectors via Microsoft Graph slash commands.
- Slash-command source targeting —
/mail, /teams, /sharepoint, /onedrive, /onenote, /task, /connectors, /all, /ask, /workiq, /clear.
- Slash-command discovery popup — keyboard-navigable suggestions appear as you type
/....
- Snippet pinning — persist results as named snippets in the cross-editor shared store.
- Shared chat history — append/search history shared with the VS Code extension.
- Timestamped handoff documents — generate
PLAN.md, TASKS.md, TEST_PLAN.md, and optional HANDOFF.md for GitHub Copilot handoff.
- Soft Copilot handoff — copy a generated prompt to the clipboard, append selected results to
HANDOFF.md, and open GitHub Copilot Chat in Visual Studio when the command is available.
- Copilot reply actions — Copilot answers remain visible in the tool window with explicit Copy, Append to active editor, and Replace selection/document actions.
/ask context chat — requires pinned snippets, caps the forwarded context, sends it to Microsoft 365 Copilot, and saves the reply to shared chat history without automatically editing or opening a document./workiq natural language work intelligence — sends A2A v1.0 queries to the Work IQ Gateway with a dedicated token audience, keeps a separate Work IQ conversation context, and resets that context on /clear.- Local
#file context — mention workspace files such as #README.md or #"docs/design notes.md" in plain chat, /ask, or /workiq prompts. Copilot chat receives explicit file context; Work IQ receives bounded file text only when the Work IQ local-file opt-in is enabled.
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