Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code Have 50 Million MAUs

Microsoft announced that Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code now have a collective 50 million monthly active users (MAUs).

“I’m thrilled to share that we’ve hit an incredible milestone together: 50 million developers are actively using Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code each month,” Microsoft corporate vice president Amanda Silver writes. “That’s 50 million of you writing code, debugging late into the night, collaborating on projects, and building the future with us. This isn’t just a statistic–it’s a testament to the real work, innovation, and collaboration happening every day around the globe.”

Visual Studio–“big” Visual Studio, as I now think of it–is now 28 years old, Silver recounts, and it has evolved over those years from an integrated development environment (IDE) focused solely on Windows to one that supports creating cross-platform solutions, cloud-native apps, games, data science workflows, and more. If anything, it’s more comprehensive than ever–and it now directly integrates with GitHub Copilot for AI-assisted code creation and editing.

Visual Studio Code is “just” 10 years old, but this lighter weight IDE was always cross-platform at heart and its biggest accomplishment, perhaps, is how beloved it is in Linux and Mac developer environments in addition to Windows. VS Code was built to be modular from the start so developers can add only the functionality they want, via extensions. There are now over 100,000 extensions in the VS Code Marketplace, four times the number for “big” Visual Studio. And VS Code is even better integrated with GitHub Copilot than its sibling, if anything.

Visual Studio fans should check out Microsoft’s special anniversary wallpapers as well. There are versions for desktop, phone, and watch.