We want to mark old versions as “out of support” and not select them by default to make it clear that these versions of Python are effectively past their end of life and may have security vulnerabilities.We will not be removing these versions, nor adding newer versions. In that case, our approach will be to mark versions of Python that are not getting updated installers built by PSF and that have known security issues being marked as “Out of Support” in Visual Studio setup.

This poses a problem if security issues are found in older versions of Python. However, older versions of the Python workload for Visual Studio will not be updated to support newer versions of Python. That means at some point in the future you can expect newer releases of Visual Studio 2022 to add support for Python 3.10, and then 3.11.

Going forward, the most recent release of Visual Studio will support the most recent version of Python that has broad adoption. That means that the last binary installer update for Python 3.9 will be made available by the Python Software Foundation (PSF) around March in 2022, and earlier versions are not getting installer updates at all. New versions of Python are released annually, and binary installers are available for Windows for 1.5 years after release. The life cycle of Python versions is very different to that of Visual Studio releases. For example, Visual Studio 2019 targeted Python 3.7, while Visual Studio 2022 targets Python 3.9 (Python 3.10 has just come out, but there are still many popular packages that are not fully supported, so Python 3.9 is a better choice). With the release of Visual Studio 2022, we are making changes to how we support installing Python runtimes from Visual Studio Setup, to help reconcile the fact that the lifetime of Python versions available as binary installers from the Python Software Foundation is different to that of Visual Studio.Įach version of Visual Studio targets a specific Python version.

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