Abstract

Microsoft will no longer be shipping or supporting the Visual Studio extensions supporting development work against Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, and for the Power Platform tools, for Visual Studio versions other than Visual Studio 2022.

What will change?

We have supported older versions of Visual Studio for our extension that includes the project system, the X++ compiler, and so on for a long time, but we have made the decision to not support those earlier versions in the future. We will no longer ship the VSIX files for those versions, and you will not find those versions installed on VHDs or CHEs that you get from us.

Why are we doing this?

There are several reasons:
1. Visual Studio 2022 (VS 2022) is a great product, with a contemporary look and feel that satisfies almost everybody. The this can no longer be said for the earlier versions of Visual Studio.

1. VS 2022 is the first version of Visual Studio that is built on a 64-bit framework. This removed a lot of the restrictions that we faced in the Finance and Operations world. As you probably know, the Dynamics 365 codebase is huge, and that made it difficult to get the memory footprint needed for debugging situations where the Application Suite model features prominently. That is not so much a problem in the 64-bit world, at least if the user is running on a capable machine.

2. We want to concentrate all our development efforts on one platform only. This improves the cadence for us shipping bugfixes and new features to you. We have already made several performance improvements that only apply to the VS 2022 version.

The upgrade from older versions of VS 2022 to the newest version is completely seamless – you just download the version you want from here and run the installation.

Let us know what you think.

Please take the opportunity to tell us what you think about this, and about any other issue that you deal with in your development work. In the extensions menu you will find an item called Give Feedback where you can provide ratings and comments. We urge you to be as constructive and detailed as possible in that feedback, so we can accurately translate it into product improvements. After all, the two minutes you spend there now can translate to hours saved for you and your peers later.

We look forward to hearing from you, and to rolling out upcoming changes in VS 2022 (and only there!)