3 Unexpected Ways Copilot Edges CodeWhisperer for .NET 9 Devs
I processed over 2,000 lines of legacy C# last month, untangling years of technical debt in a crucial microservice. It was a grind, and honestly, the thought of doing it without some AI assistance felt like going back to the stone age. My team’s been using GitHub Copilot for Workspaces for a while, and it’s become indispensable for our .NET 9 projects. But with all the buzz around Amazon CodeWhisperer's recent C# model updates and its deep integration into AWS services, I started to wonder if we were missing out. For a couple of weeks, I decided to run both in parallel in Visual Studio 2026 and Rider 2026, specifically looking at their ai code completion csharp capabilities.
My Initial Jitters and Basic Completion
Setting up both was straightforward enough. Copilot for Workspaces was already active, and CodeWhisperer's plugin for Visual Studio 2026 (or Rider 2026) installed without a hitch. My first impression, especially when writing new methods or simple classes, was that Copilot felt more organic. It would often suggest completions that extended naturally from my variable names or comments. CodeWhisperer, on the other hand, sometimes felt a little too eager to complete an entire method or class with boilerplate that wasn't quite what I needed, often requiring more backspacing than actual coding.
