Microsoft's popular integrated development environment (IDE) Visual Studio is utilized by lots of developers all over the globe. The company recently released Visual Studio 2022, which contains a bunch of UI enhancements for Windows and Mac, performance improvements, and more. Interestingly, the Redmond tech giant is also changing the way that it bundles Python with each release of the IDE, something that it has described in more detail in its recent blog post.
Traditionally, each new release of Visual Studio targets a specific version of Python. For example, Visual Studio 2019 came with Python 3.7 whereas Visual Studio 2022 supports Python 3.9 as the default. However, the release cadence for Python is a bit tricky because new versions are released annually but binary Windows installers are typically available for 18 months after release. This means that under the current lifecycle, if Visual Studio 2022's life extends past 18 months, it will be bundling an outdated version of Python (Python 3.9).
Microsoft has now changed its Python bundling strategy to tackle this problem. From now on, new Visual Studio versions will target the most recent broadly adopted version of Python. In essence, this indicates that when Visual Studio 2022 is updated sometime in the near future, new releases of the IDE may bundle Python 3.10 or newer, depending upon which version is "broadly adopted".
That said, older versions of Python workloads will not be updated to support newer versions. Microsoft will explicitly mark these outdated versions of Python as "Out of Support" during ..
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