In an effort to streamline support and manage updates, Microsoft recently confirmed its plans to discontinue Visual Studio 2013. The legacy Integrated Development Environment (IDE) will officially be phased out in April, and Microsoft is pushing users to shift to the newer version, Visual Studio 2022.
The company unveiled its strategy in a blog post on January 2, 2024, stating that extended assistance for Visual Studio 2013 will terminate on April 9. The action will freeze updates, including essential security patches, for all editions, products, and components associated with Visual Studio 2013. Notably, mainstream support for the IDE ceased in 2019. However, under the extended support program, Microsoft furnished the platform only with security fixes.
Further in the update, Microsoft indicated that extended support would supplant mainstream support for Visual Studio 2019 starting from April 9. In the meantime, the tech behemoth highlighted the following key support dates:
- Visual Studio 2015 will continue to receive extended support till October 14, 2025.
- The extended support end date for Visual Studio 2017 is April 13, 2027.
- The updates for Visual Studio 2019 Preview Channel have been discontinued. It is recommended for users to transfer to either Visual Studio 2019 Release Channel (version 16.11) or Visual Studio 2022 Preview to maintain security and benefit from potential feature improvements.
In the declaration, Microsoft lauded Visual Studio 2022 as its most efficient IDE ever, recommending it as the optimum choice for all its customers. It has a trio of channels: the Preview that introduces prospective features for user feedback, Current that delivers new functions once they're all set for large-scale utilisation, and Long-Term Servicing that allows development teams to govern their adoption of emerging feature releases.
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