It’s a New Year, and a good time for a reminder of upcoming dates in the Visual Studio support lifecycle. Support for Visual Studio 2013 will end on April 9 of this year. If you’re using an older version of Visual Studio, we want to keep you productive and secure when using Visual Studio, and strongly recommend you upgrade to Visual Studio 2022.
Additionally, Visual Studio 2019 will transition from Mainstream to Extended Support on April 9, 2024.
Further, if you’re using the Community Edition of Visual Studio 2017 or 2019, we recommend you upgrade to Visual Studio 2022 Community, our first 64-bit IDE which also contains key productivity improvements in the editor, built-in support for Git version control and rich integration with GitHub, AI-powered code completions, and tools for .NET 8 and .NET MAUI.
Support Timeframe Reminders for older versions
If you’re still using an older version of Visual Studio, here’s a reminder of key support lifecycle dates.
- Visual Studio 2013 remains in extended support until April 9, 2024. During extended support we’ll provide fixes only for security issues. You must be using Update 5 to remain under support.
- Visual Studio 2015 remains in extended support through October 14, 2025. During extended support we’ll provide fixes only for security issues. You must be using Update 3 to remain under support.
- Visual Studio 2017 remains in extended support until April 13, 2027. During extended support we’ll provide fixes only for security issues. You must be using version 15.9 to remain under support.
- Visual Studio 2019 version 16.11 is in mainstream support until April 9, 2024 and will then transition to extended support through April 10, 2029. You must be using version 16.11 to remain under support.
- Visual Studio 2019 Preview Channel is no longer receiving updates. We recommend users migrate to either the Visual Studio 2019 Release Channel (version 16.11) or Visual Studio 2022 Preview to stay secure and receive the latest feature updates.
Visual Studio 2013 Retirement
On April 9, 2024, support will end for all Visual Studio 2013 editions, associated products, runtimes, and components, and they will no longer receive security or any other updates. These include:
- Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate, Premium, Professional, Community, Express for Web, Express for Windows, Express for Windows Desktop, Team Explorer, and Test Professional editions.
- Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2013
- Visual Studio 2013 Shell (Integrated and Isolated).
- Visual Studio 2013 version of components including Deployment Agents, Agent IntelliTrace Collector, Microsoft Azure Tools, Multibyte MFC Library, Remote Tools, Release Management, SDK, SQL Server Data Tools, Team Explorer, and Web Tools Extensions.
Upgrade to Visual Studio 2022
Visual Studio 2022 is our most productive IDE ever, and we recommend all our customers upgrade to it. With Visual Studio 2022 we offer three channels: Preview Channel so that you can provide early feedback on the latest features. The Current Channel provides these new features when they are ready for widespread use. Users should install each minor update of the Current Channel as it is released to stay in support. Finally, for the Enterprise and Professional users we offer Long-Term Servicing Channels (LTSCs) to give your development team more control over when you adopt new feature releases. We provide quality and security fixes for LTSCs for 18 months after release.
We recommend users upgrade to the latest version of Visual Studio to remain under support. For the end-of-support dates for all versions of Visual Studio, see the Microsoft Product Lifecycle Center. Upgrade today!
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Hi
Interesting, can you confirm that BIDS projects from VS 2012/2013/2015/2017/2019 are compatible with VS2022?
Or do they need upgrading, and to what – is it SSDT (new BIDS)?
What will happen if we stay on VS 2012? The juice might not be worth the squeeze to upgrade.
Thanks
JB
For context I installed the latest VS version available that supported BIDS projects when moving to SQL Server 2016.
It might be worth investing a couple of quid in getting BIDS/SSDT support within a couple of months of a major VS version release.
Although with all the cash going to Azure and AI (not to mention all that copyright works you’ll have to pay for), there probably isn’t much left for on-site dev tooling.
It's all nice that you're trying to make the work of developers easier.
However, you did not solve many problems at VS 2019 as well as 2022
2022 finally does not work with older versions of access databases.
Both vs 2019 and vs 2022 have a lot of bugs in the program that you don't solve through your upgrades. The list of bugs is too long to mention here. Works best vs 2017 as well as old vb...
Post the bugs you have found in the Developer Community website. If you already did, publish those here so we can upvote it and gather more traction.
On the other hand, young developers are learning and working on C#, JavaScript, TypeScript. modern .NET and deploying to Azure, so VS 2022 and Visual Studio Code are perfect for them.
Many young developers are hired to work on existing projects – few are lucky to work on greenfield projects.
They have to develop for many years to come existing large projects using .NET Framework, WinForms, ASP.NET MVC (not core) etc..
For those cases the old bugs and performance issues in Visual Studio make the day-today life very difficult.
Based on your telemetry data, can you show us approximately how many users are currently using each version of VS (from VS2023 to VS2022)?