Faster Updates: Visual Studio Switches to Annual Release Cycle

Microsoft has announced that it will accelerate the release cycle of its development environment, Visual Studio. The current main version, Visual Studio 2026, was released together with .NET 10 on November 11, 2025, and followed Visual Studio 2022, released in autumn 2021, after a four-year interval. However, in the future, a new version of the development environment is to be released every November, along with a new .NET version. The next release in November 2026 will be called Visual Studio 2027.

The more frequent updates are intended to help integrate new features into the IDE more quickly without compromising their reliability and stability. Since Visual Studio 2017, Microsoft has been gradually increasing the release cadence and introducing quarterly updates, as Microsoft explains in the blog post announcing it.

Monthly Feature Releases

Not only the main Visual Studio versions, but also feature releases will now appear more frequently: Microsoft plans to release one feature release every month instead of every three months as before.

Within the new cycle, two release channels are available: the Insiders channel allows early testing of new features, which then move to the Stable channel after stabilization. The stable channel replaces the previous current channel and is updated monthly.

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Impact on Licenses

The changes also affect product registration: those who use a standalone Professional license will now have to purchase the license for the new version every year. For Professional and Enterprise editions with an active Visual Studio subscription, the registration process remains unchanged, and Visual Studio Community remains free for eligible users in open-source projects, education, and small businesses.

The lifecycles of the earlier versions of Visual Studio 2022, 2019, and 2017 remain unaffected.

(mai)