DevExpress Agent Skills — Recent Updates
DevExpress Agent Skills help your favorite AI coding assistant to write accurate DevExpress code. Supported assistants include the following:
- GitHub Copilot (VS Code, Visual Studio 2026, and CLI)
- Claude Code
- Cursor
- Codex CLI
- JetBrains Junie
- JetBrains AI Assistant
In this post, I'll summarize our most recent update including: 14 new WinForms skills, a repository-wide review of every skill we've shipped previously, and plugin installation for Codex CLI and Cursor.
New WinForms Skills
WinForms developers are familiar with the convention: form controls belong in *.Designer.cs, generated by InitializeComponent(), not in constructor code. Using this approach, the form remains editable in the Visual Studio designer. AI assistants often miss this distinction. The code compiles and runs, but the designer surface breaks for the next developer who opens the form.
We created our first set of DevExpress WinForms Agent Skills to teach coding assistants WinForms-specific development patterns and best practices. Each skill leads with the designer-file pattern for the associated control. An assistant therefore treats this pattern as the default choice rather than the exception, and recommends runtime code only for dynamic or data-driven usage scenarios.
Our 14 new agent skills apply to the following UI controls and features::
- Accordion
- AI Chat
- Charts
- Data Grid
- Editors
- Layout
- Loading Indicators
- MVVM
- Pivot Grid
- Property Grid
- Ribbon and Bars
- Scheduler
- Tab Control
- Tree List
These skills cover the most common usage scenarios for DevExpress WinForms controls, with every API reference verified against the product. When a skill covers a task, a coding agent solves it without querying the MCP server to reduce the latency and token usage. When a skill does not include enough detail to finish a task, the agent queries the MCP server for the missing details. Each skill lists the areas where this fallback is expected.
We evaluated every skill the way we test a shipping product feature: against real, multi-step prompts rather than synthetic "hello world" checks. Each prompt ran twice, once with the skill installed and once without. We repeated this comparison across different models/capability levels. The following prompts come from our test set, and they also illustrate what you can ask for once you install these skills, from a single data-entry form to a complete application:
- "Build a Visual Studio-like shell application with a docked, central area and side/tool windows using the Dock Manager."
- "I want to use DevExpress XtraScheduler in this project to display meeting schedule and tracking meeting location. Data source is
Meeting.All." - "Build an app from scratch where DevExpress TreeList is the primary UI element."
- "Two view models need to communicate without holding a direct reference to each other."
- "Given a raw
CREATE TABLE users (...)statement, build me a form to edit this data."
I encourage you to install our new skills and share your feedback so we can further improve our implementation. This is the first WinForms Skills release. We plan to cover more usage scenarios per control in future updates.
Also in This Update
We updated every skill we already ship to improve reliability and ensure assistants follow instructions from the skill. The updates includes:
- Enhanced how a skill calls the DevExpress Documentation MCP Server, so an assistant reliably consults documentation when unsure of an API instead of skipping the step.
- Refined elicitation: how a skill prompts you for missing details before it generates code, instead of guessing.
- Verified and updated the minimum .NET version for each skill (.NET 8 for v26.1).
- Applied additional accuracy-related fixes for Office File & PDF API and DevExpress Reports skills.
Plugin Support for Codex CLI and Cursor
Plugin installation now works with Codex CLI and Cursor, in addition to GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Code. If you use either tool, install skills through the plugin marketplace rather than copying skill folders manually. Review the following documentation topics for plugin installation guidelines:
Get the Update
A plugin is the simplest way to stay current. Once you install plugins, most agents and IDEs check the marketplace for updates automatically, so these changes reach you without manual intervention.
If you copied skill folders directly into .github/skills/, .claude/skills/, or a different agent's skill folder, download fresh copies from our GitHub repository and replace those local folders.
Share Your Feedback
Try a skill and tell us how it went. Open a ticket in the DevExpress Support Center and describe what worked well and what didn't. Flag issues in the AI-generated code a given skill produced: a wrong API call, a missed step, anything you had to fix manually afterward. Feedback such as this helped shape our update and will shape future updates as well.
