Microsoft is planning a huge upgrade for Visual Studio

Although Microsoft offers Visual Studio Code as a lightweight, but very powerful, open-source code editor to customers, its flagship development environment is actually vanilla Visual Studio. This is a full-fledged integrated development environment (IDE) with .NET integration and other features that make it more suitable for complex project management. Now, a new report has revealed that Microsoft is planning a major upgrade to Visual Studio.

Media outlet Business Insider has viewed an internal Microsoft memo which details the company's plans to release a significant upgrade to Visual Studio. As can be expected, this update will focus heavily on AI, which is necessary in order to compete with other alternatives like Amazon Kiro, which is being touted as an AI-powered IDE.

The memo was penned in April by Jay Parikh, who joined Microsoft less than a year ago as the Executive Vice President (EVP). Business Insider notes that Parikh leads the company's CoreAI organization, which is responsible for developer tooling, so Visual Studio falls nicely inside the executive's wheelhouse.

Parikh's memo refers to this major release as "Visual Studio 18", which is interesting considering that Visual Studio is currently on version 17. The IDE received an update last month which allowed developers to access better AI models while flexibly managing their billing. It is important to note that Visual Studio's last major update was back in 2021, when Microsoft released Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 6, so another major release would make sense.

That said, while there is a chance that the next significant upgrade to Visual Studio will land this year, no concrete timelines have been revealed yet. The memo also indicates that this AI-powered version of the IDE is currently in the process of "early dogfooding", which means that it's actively being used by Microsoft's own employees for testing purposes.

Source

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Posted Friday 25 July 2025 at 2:29 am AEST (my time).

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