With the release of Visual Studio 2022, Microsoft is changing the way it supports the installation of Python runtime from the Visual Studio installer. According to the introduction of Microsoft’s official blog, the life cycle of Visual Studio is inconsistent with that of Python, which causes Visual Studio to sometimes bundle older versions of Python.
For example, the target of Visual Studio 2019 is Python 3.7, and the target of Visual Studio 2022 is Python 3.9. A new version of Python is released every year, and the binary installer is available for Windows within 1.5 years after release. This means that the last binary installer update for Python 3.9 will be released around March 2022, after which it will no longer be supported.
Looking ahead, the latest version of Visual Studio will support the latest version of Python that has been widely adopted. At some point in the future, Visual Studio 2022 will add support for Python 3.10 and 3.11. However, the old version of Visual Studio will not support the new version of Python. Microsoft’s approach to the old version of Visual Studio is to mark the Python version as “unsupported”, but it will not delete these versions or add newer versions.