Microsoft is accelerating Visual Studio’s update cycle, moving from quarterly to monthly feature updates and introducing annual major releases each November (alongside .NET). Meanwhile, Visual C++ (MSVC) is adopting .NET’s release cadence, meaning most versions will receive only nine months of support.

Principal program manager Paul Chapman said the changes align Visual Studio with VS Code’s monthly updates and keep “GitHub Copilot experiences always up to date.” Previously, Visual Studio 2022 remained current for four years. In the case of VS Code, developers have become used to a procession of AI-related feature changes every month, and it seems that keeping up with Copilot is also a factor in these Visual Studio changes.

The new one year lifecycle for Visual Studio does have consequences for developers using a standalone license rather than a subscription. “If you use a standalone Professional license, you simply purchase the new annual version each year,” said Chapman. A developer responded that “I hate it that they are planning to release a new major version each year from now on. Means you need to either buy a subscription or purchase a new product key each year.”

The community edition continues to be available for free, but only for individuals or small organizations (defined as fewer then 250 PCs and less then $1million annual revenue). Otherwise, use of the community edition is restricted by the license and excludes most development and testing.

Enterprise customers who value stability more than new features can use a long term servicing channel (LTSC) release which will extend the life of a Visual Studio version for one year.

Chapman explained that the IDE is decoupled from the build tools, SDKs and runtimes, which have their own release and support schedules. In the case of MSVC, there will now be a new release every six months (May and November), but these releases will have only 9 months of support. A long-term support (LTS) release will appear every two years, with support for three years. The just-released MSVC 14.5 has been designated an LTS version, aligning with the .NET release cycle.

According to Microsoft group product manager Marian Luparu, driving developers towards recent versions of MSVC is necessary for security and compliance. “Meeting standards, such as NIST [US national institute of standards and technology] and CISA [US cybersecurity and infrastructure agency], means depending on outdated compilers is no longer acceptable,” he said.

Visual Studio users are concerned about things other than Copilot updates. Currently the second-highest voted Visual Studio issue is the lack of the familiar blue theme from previous versions in Visual Studio 2026, dismissed as “out of scope” by Microsoft despite comments such as “bring blue theme back like it was in vs 2017 or 2010, give some colors to icons, make icons bigger, whoever is designing those themes probably never spend a whole day coding.”

According to program manager Ruben Rios, “recreating the exact blue theme is not practical. Instead we have introduced tinted themes like Cool Breeze, Cool Slate, and Moonlight Glow.”

Developers observed that this demonstrates lack of flexibility in the supposedly improved UI of the latest Visual Studio.