[Preview] Podman support in VS Container tools

[fiveisprime]

Visual Studio 2026 Insiders is here and it includes official Podman support in VS Container Tools. 🎉

To get started, startup podman and open your solution in Visual Studio. Container Tools will automatically detect the Podman environment and you're good to go. Optionally, you can manually select Podman as your container runtime by going to Tools > Options > Container Tools > General > Container Runtime and selecting Podman from the dropdown menu.

Try it out and let us know how it goes! If you'd like to schedule some time to chat with me and walk through any issues, schedule time here: https://aka.ms/MeetWithMatt

Notes

• As part of this change, some settings have been updated to avoid confusion and use more neutral language. For example, DockerfileContext to ContainerBuildContext.
• Compose support is not available for Podman in this release.

[cjbush]

Any word on when Compose support will be added in? We're stuck on Docker Desktop until then. Thanks!

[RoySalisbury]

All the searching I have done says this works with devcontiners. I have VS Code setup with a devcontiner for my solution, and it works fine. But if I clone the repo how do I get it to work in Visual Studio 2026? I have tried both the release and the insiders and noting happens, and I cant find a way to open the workspace or solution in a devcontiner. Podman is setup and running on my system. This is a BRAND NEW Windows 11 install, with Podman, WSL and Visual Studio (so no older versions).