All versions of Microsoft Visual Studio Official ISO setups in one place

Microsoft Visual Studio (VS for short) consists of a series of development kit products produced by Microsoft (written in C++ and C#), and is currently the most popular IDE (integrated development environment) for developing applications on Windows platform. As of writing this post, its latest release is Visual Studio 2019, based on Microsoft .NET Framework 4.7.

As a complete set of development tools, Visual Studio includes most of the tools needed throughout a software development lifecycle, such as UML (Unified Modeling Language) tool, code control tool, integrated development environments (IDE), and more. The written target code is applicable to all platforms supported by Microsoft, including Microsoft Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows CE, Microsoft .NET Framework, .Net Core, .NET Compact Framework, as well as Microsoft Silverlight, Windows Phone.

In 1997, Microsoft released Visual Studio 97. It includes Visual Basic 5.0 and Visual C++ 5.0 for Windows development, Visual J++ for Java development, Visual FoxPro for database development, and Visual InterDev for creating DHTML (Dynamic HTML). Among them, both Visual Basic and Visual FoxPro use a separate development environment, yet other development languages use the unified development environment instead.

In 1998, Microsoft released Visual Studio 6.0. Meanwhile, the versions of development environment for all programming languages were increased to 6.0 too. Plus, this is also the last release of Visual Basic. Because since its next version (7.0), Microsoft Visual Basic had evolved into a new, object-oriented language: Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET for short, first launched in 2002). At the same time, because Microsoft was sued by Sun company due to the fact that Microsoft extended Sun's Java language and caused it to be incompatible with Sun's Java virtual machine, Microsoft no longer included the development environment for the Java virtual machine in the subsequent releases of Visual Studio.

In 2002, with the raise of .NET slogan and the releases of Windows XP and Office XP, Microsoft released Visual Studio .NET (whose internal version is 7.0). In this version of Visual Studio, Microsoft sold Visual FoxPro as a separate development environment and eliminated Visual InterDev. At the same time, Microsoft introduced a code hosting mechanism built on the .NET framework (version 1.0) and a new programming language C# (pronounced C Sharp). C# is a modern language based on the most powerful two languages C++ and Java, also the language used for writing the entire .NET framework.

.NET's Common Language Runtime (CLR) mechanism was designed to support the components developed in different languages within the same project. All CLR supported code will be interpreted as machine code executable for CLR and then run. Visual Basic and Visual C++ were extended to a development environment that supports managed code mechanism; Visual Basic .NET thoroughly remade itself based on Visual Basic, and started to completely support the object-oriented programming mechanism. And Visual J++ changed to Visual J#. The latter only has the same syntax as Java, but not for the Java virtual machine any more, for the .NET Framework instead.

In 2005, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2005. Since then, the .NET word had been erased from all Microsoft programming languages' name, but this version of Visual Studio is still .NET framework-oriented (version 2.0). Besides, this version of Visual Studio consists of many editions, each of which was tailored for different development roles. Also, since this version, Microsoft had started to offer a free edition of Visual Studio - named with Express Edition.

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Included Components

Supported Products

• Microsoft Visual C++
• Microsoft Visual C#
• Microsoft Visual Basic
• Microsoft Visual Web Developer
• Team Foundation Server
• Visual FoxPro
• Visual SourceSafe
• Microsoft Visual J++/Microsoft Visual J#
• Visual InterDev

Versions History

Universal Product Keys

Edition Statement

Download URLs