A brief history of VS

VS 2022 is version 13 of this application created by Microsoft. VS has been consolidated among developers for having a friendly user experience, good support with regular updates, and powerful tools for writing clean and scalable code. VS has support for many technologies and platforms. For many developers, VS is the ultimate tool for all project types.

To understand the evolution of this tool, we must examine its history and timeline.

VS 6.0 was released in 1997, and it was the first version of this tool. This version was created to work with Visual Basic 6.0. Then, in 2002, a new version was released, which included compatibility with .NET and C# (a new programming language at that time). Since then, it's been the favorite tool for .NET developers.

VS started as a premium application with a closed license, but since VS 2005, Microsoft began a new strategy with a freemium (free/premium) version, which is a basic/free public version that you can use for your personal projects, study, or midsize applications, and other versions at a cost for professional developers, large companies, or for those who want to use advanced tools.

Microsoft releases a new VS version every 2 or 3 years and provides updates for that version every 2 or 3 months, which means complete support.

A version of note is VS 2012 because the development team implemented a new look and feel and many improvements in the user experience, which are also present in the 2022 version. Some of the most important improvements in VS 2012 over previous versions were performance, the possibility to choose from light and dark themes, and new icons.

Now that you have a general idea of what VS is, let's examine each of the flavors available today.