Report: Visual Studio 18 to Be a Major Upgrade

Visual Studio is Microsoft’s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) for software developers of all kinds, but it hasn’t received a major upgrade in several years. But if a new report in Business Insider is true, that’s about to change.

The publication says it has reviewed an internal email from Jay Parikh, who joined Microsoft last October as an executive vice president and member of CEO Satya Nadella’s senior leadership team. Parikh leads Microsoft’s CoreAI Platform and Tools group, which was created when he arrived and includes the oversight of Microsoft’s developer and AI platform offerings.

The details are few, but Parikh emailed his team in April to describe his vision for the next major release of Visual Studio, called Visual Studio 18. (The current release, Visual Studio 2022, shipped in 2021 and is called Visual Studio 17 internally.) Microsoft is in the “early dogfooding” stage with this release, the publication says, and it will predictably be “packed with AI features.”

Granted, the current Visual Studio version is already “packed with AI features,” including an integrated GitHub Copilot for AI pair programming and inline help. And the latest update added updates to the products MCP (Model Context Protocol) capabilities and AI model support.

I wish there was more information here. But Microsoft Developer Division president Julia Liuson, who reports to Parikh, told her team last month that “using AI is no longer optional” and that the use of AI would impact employees’ performance reviews going forward. So it’s likely that Visual Studio 18 will reflect this reality and offer enough value to help stem the advance of competing tools like the Cursor AI editor and Replit, an AI agent-based tool that Microsoft developers use internally.