After testing the Visual Studio 2026 release with Insiders for the past few months, Microsoft today announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2026. Along with Visual Studio 2026, Microsoft also announced the availability of .NET 10.
Visual Studio 2026 is a major update for Visual Studio which includes over 300 feature requests and 5000 bug fixes. It also comes with a redesigned user experience based on the Fluent UI design system with 11 new tinted themes, significant performance improvements, and several new AI features, including GitHub Copilot integration throughout the IDE.
Microsoft claims that this new Visual Studio release reduces UI hangs by over 50%. Also, the project load times have been significantly reduced when compared to its predecessor. Overall, it will run much faster, smoother, and more responsive.
Since there are no major platform changes, over 4,000 extensions that work with Visual Studio 2022 will also work with this new Visual Studio 2026. One of the biggest pain points of updating Visual Studio is that it would also update the build tools causing problems for developer workflows. With Visual Studio 2026, the IDE is decoupled from its build tools allowing developers to enjoy monthly updates with new features without disturbing their toolchains.
Microsoft today also announced the launch of .NET 10, a Long Term Support (LTS) release, and Microsoft will support this release for three years until November 10, 2028. Since this release comes with very significant performance improvements, with improvements across the runtime, workloads, and languages, and new features, Microsoft is recommending developers to upgrade their production applications to .NET 10. Developers can also use GitHub Copilot to guide them in upgrading their existing .NET applications to .NET 10.
Developers can download Visual Studio 2026 and .NET 10 using the links below:
Source: Microsoft