Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 Available for Download
Today, I am excited to announce that Visual Studio 2015 and .Net 4.6 are available for download! — These releases are the next big step in the journey we outlined last November to bring the productivity of Visual Studio and .NET …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands exactly on the July 20 date Microsoft committed to three weeks earlier when it announced the release window for Visual Studio 2015, Team Foundation Server 2015 and .NET 4.6 — the fulfillment of the productivity roadmap laid out the previous November. Alongside the download, Visual Studio gains support for recompiling Win32 apps to run natively on ARM devices, extending the toolchain beyond x86 machines.
Within this coverage arc, the release is an early waypoint in a decade-long reshaping of the IDE itself: Visual Studio 2017's modular, multi-platform rebuild followed two years later, then the Visual Studio Online preview moved development into the browser, before Visual Studio 2022's 64-bit launch with Hot Reload and eventually the 2026 preview's AI integration.
First-order effects
- Windows developers can immediately build against .NET 4.6 and ship with Visual Studio 2015, and teams with existing Win32 codebases gain a supported path to native ARM binaries as ARM devices reach their users.
Second-order effects
- Cross-platform capability becomes table stakes inside Microsoft's own tooling, pressuring the next release cycle toward the multi-platform, modular direction Visual Studio 2017 took, while web-hosted rivals sharpen the case for the browser-based Visual Studio Online preview.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the developer environment shifts structurally from a periodically shipped desktop product toward a continuously updated service layer — the trajectory this coverage traces through cloud previews to AI-native versions.
The trend: Visual Studio is evolving from a boxed desktop IDE into a continuously delivered, cross-platform and increasingly AI-integrated developer platform, with each major release widening what codebases it can target.