Use this tag if you have a specific question about Visual Studio features and functionality. DO NOT use this tag on questions regarding code which merely happened to be written in Visual Studio. Consider tagging the exact technology area your question links to and also tagging a more specific version of Visual Studio. Please mention your exact VS version, edition, and update level in your question. DO NOT use this tag on questions regarding VS Code.
Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) offered by Microsoft used to develop computer programs for Microsoft Windows, as well as web sites, web applications and web services.
Microsoft Visual Studio History
Prior to Visual Studio Version 4.0, there were Visual Basic 3, Visual C++, Visual FoxPro and Visual SourceSafe as separate products.
Below is the list of the products along with their release date. Note: the actual version numbers for the products are sometimes confused with the last two digits of the 'year' field of the name; these version numbers are shown as "V-nn.x.y.z," where the given "nn" value is the major version number, and 'x', 'y' and 'z' would be the minor version, build and revision numbers, respectively.
- visual-studio-97 - Visual Studio 97 - February 1997 (V-5.x.y.z)
- visual-studio-6 - Visual Studio 6.0 - June 1998 (V-6.x.y.z)
- visual-studio-2002 - Visual Studio .NET (2002) - February 13, 2002 (V-7.0.y.z)
- visual-studio-2003 - Visual Studio .NET (2003) - April 24, 2003 (V-7.1.y.z)
- visual-studio-2005 - Visual Studio 2005 - November 7, 2005 (V-8.x.y.z)
- visual-studio-2008 - Visual Studio 2008 - November 19, 2007 (V-9.x.y.z)
- visual-studio-2010 - Visual Studio 2010 - April 12, 2010 (V-10.x.y.z)
- visual-studio-2012 - Visual Studio 2012 - September 12, 2012 (V-11.x.y.z)
- visual-studio-2013 - Visual Studio 2013 - October 17, 2013 (V-12.x.y.z)
- visual-studio-2015 - Visual Studio 2015 - July 20, 2015 (V-14.x.y.z)
- visual-studio-2017 - Visual Studio 2017 - March 7, 2017 (V-15.x.y.z)
- visual-studio-2019 - Visual Studio 2019 - April 2, 2019 (V-16.x.y.z)
- visual-studio-2022 - Visual Studio 2022 [MS Blog] - February 14, 2023 (V-17.x.y.z)
The current stable release is Visual Studio 2022 - for questions regarding this specific version use visual-studio-2022.
Visual Studio Editions
- Professional includes end-to-end solution to meet demanding quality and scale needs of teams of all sizes
- Enterprise featuring professional developer tools, services, and subscription benefits for small teams
- Community is a free, fully-featured IDE for students, open-source and individual developers
See the products page on the Microsoft site for the full list of Visual Studio products and download links. Microsoft also publishes a comparison table where major differences between editions can be seen at a glance to help you decide which edition fits your needs the most.
Using This Tag
You should ask questions about Visual Studio here on Stack Overflow, but if you have bugs to report, report them at Developer community instead.
Consider tagging the exact technology area your question links to and also tagging a more specific version of Visual Studio (see above). Please mention your exact Visual Studio version, edition, and update level in your question.
Do not use this tag on questions just because the code was written in Visual Studio. For example, a question about parsing a date/time string in .NET with C# should not ordinarily be tagged visual-studio.
More Information
Visual Studio Extensions (.vsix)
You can read about Visual Studio extensions here and see the available Extensions for the Visual Studio family of products.
Developer Community
Developer Community is a website where you can read about the Visual Studio release history. Also see all the reported bugs and find solutions for them. You can help the Visual Studio team and vote on the the issues (which you also have) and they can prioritise the problems and ship fixes to the most demanded ones. Also you can report a problem.
