Microsoft is working on a major upgrade of its flagship software-development product Visual Studio, a sign the tech giant is responding to intense competition from new AI coding tools, according to an internal memo viewed by Business Insider.
Microsoft has a free, open-source code editor called VS Code that rivals such as Amazon and Windsurf have used to build competing developer tools.
Visual Studio, meanwhile, is a paid Integrated Development Environment, or IDE, that offers more features to help developers write, debug, edit, and deploy code — and manage entire projects.
Jay Parikh is the relatively new executive who leads Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, which oversees developer tools including Visual Studio. Parikh emailed his team in April, describing plans for the “next major release” of the product, which he called “Visual Studio 18.” Business Insider viewed a copy of the memo.
The last major upgrade to Visual Studio was released in 2021. Microsoft has been working on this new version for a while already. The company started “early dogfooding,” where tech employees test their own products, to prepare for a general release, according to the memo.
Parikh didn’t disclose a timeline for the release, but a Microsoft blog earlier this year dropped a hint. “Stay tuned for more details later this summer about what’s coming next for Visual Studio,” the post stated.
The new Visual Studio will be packed with AI features, partly in response to rival services that are more AI-focused, according to a person familiar with the plans.
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Microsoft’s AI coding assistant, GitHub Copilot, recently lost share in a key part of the developer market to Cursor, according to data cited in recent note from Barclays.
Amazon just launched its own IDE called Kiro. Business Insider reported earlier this year that Amazon designed Kiro to tap into AI agents to analyze user prompts and existing data, generating code in “near real-time.”
Microsoft said it provides regular updates to the current version of Visual Studio, which is version 17 (not version 18 that Parikh described in his memo).
For example, in July, the company rolled out a revamp, 17.14.9, that added new AI features, such as support for Anthropic’s latest models and updates to Model Context Protocol, or MCP, an industry standard that helps models connect with external data sources.
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