Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code reach 50 million monthly active developers

Microsoft today announced a significant milestone for its Visual Studio product family: Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code now serve more than 50 million monthly active developers combined.

First introduced 28 years ago, Visual Studio remains a leading integrated development environment (IDE), largely due to the popularity of the Windows ecosystem. Over the years, it has evolved to support cross-platform development, cloud-native applications, game development, data science workflows, and more. It remains one of the few IDEs to include compilers, debuggers, profilers, designers, and language services out of the box.

Visual Studio by the Numbers:

• 25,000+ extensions available on the Visual Studio Marketplace
• 100,000+ developers contributing feedback, issue reports, and feature ideas
• Hundreds of thousands of Q&As in community forums
• 800+ community-reported issues fixed on average in each quarterly update

A decade ago, as Windows began losing ground to mobile platforms like iOS and Android, Microsoft introduced Visual Studio Code—a move that surprised many. Unlike its full-featured sibling, Visual Studio Code embraced a lightweight, open-source model. Rather than offering every feature out of the box, it allowed developers to customize their environment through a vast ecosystem of extensions.

Visual Studio Code by the Numbers:

• 100,000+ extensions available in the VS Code Marketplace
• 37,000+ GitHub stars on the VS Code repository
• Thousands of contributors from around the world

Amanda Silver, CVP and Head of Product for Microsoft's Developer Division and GM for Microsoft's first-party engineering systems, wrote the following regarding this milestone:

As we celebrate this milestone, we’re also standing at the beginning of a new era in software development. The AI coding revolution is fundamentally changing how we write code, and we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible.

To celebrate the 50 million milestone, Microsoft also released special anniversary wallpapers featuring both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. At the upcoming Build developer conference next week, the company is expected to unveil new updates to both tools aimed at improving the developer experience even further.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of April): 1,811

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend