Visual Studio 2015 is about to be discontinued, what should you pay attention to?

October 14, 2025 will be a 'sad milestone' for many Microsoft products, including Windows 10, Windows 10 2015 LTSC, as well as Enterprise, Education, and IoT editions of Windows 10 version 22H2. Microsoft also recently confirmed that Visual Studio 2015 will officially stop being supported at the same time.

While Visual Studio Code is growing in popularity due to its lightweight and flexible nature, Visual Studio is actually Microsoft's primary integrated development environment (IDE). The latest version is Visual Studio 2022. Microsoft will continue to support older versions like 2015, 2017, and 2019 – at least until support ends.

Specifically, Visual Studio 2015 – launched on July 20, 2015 – reached the end of mainstream support on October 13, 2020 and is currently in the 'extended support' phase. However, this phase will also end on October 14, 2025.

From that point on, Visual Studio 2015 and all related components will no longer receive security patches. The affected list includes:

1. Visual Studio 2015 Community / Enterprise / Professional
2. Visual Studio Shell, SDK
3. Team Foundation Server (TFS)
4. MSVC Tools v140 and many other components

Microsoft recommends that users upgrade to the new version of Visual Studio as soon as possible to ensure security and compatibility, including:

1. Visual Studio 2017 (v15.9) will still receive security updates until April 13, 2027 .
2. Visual Studio 2019 (v16.11) will be supported until April 10, 2029 .
3. Visual Studio 2022 (v17.4) is now officially supported, and will enter extended support from January 12, 2027 to January 13, 2032 .

Microsoft also encourages users to switch to Visual Studio 2022, which integrates many modern technologies such as Git , improved .NET , and especially Copilot - an AI programming assistant developed by GitHub.

Micah Soto

Update 06 August 2025