GitHub Actions’ Windows hosted runner migration to Visual Studio 2026 starts soon
GitHub has recently planned a migration process for those who are using the Windows workflows in their GitHub-hosted Actions instances that migrates the installation of Visual Studio 2022 to the newer Visual Studio 2026. The windows-latest and windows-2025 runner images will use Visual Studio 2026, starting from June 8th, 2026.
The February 2026 announcement post stated that there’s a newer runner image that focuses on using Visual Studio 2026 as a public preview. As the windows-2025 runner image has reached general availability on May 4th, it used Visual Studio 2026 as the integrated development environment instead of Visual Studio 2022.
Starting from June 8th, 2026, the rollout is expected to end by June 15th, 2026. The workflows will gradually shift over to the newer Visual Studio 2026 IDE instead of the older VS2022 version. However, for those who are still depending on the older Visual Studio 2022 IDE, manual adjustments are needed to ensure that the migration to VS2026 is complete without any issues, as things might break during the migration process.
In most situations, you won’t need to do anything, as the migration happens transparently. However, in case things break after migration, you’ll have to perform some changes to ensure that workflows continue to work even after migration.
#github #GitHubActions #news #Tech #Technology #update #visualStudio #VisualStudio2026 #Windows #Windows11