Last update: April 16th, 2017

Microsoft’s marketing department often names its products in names that don’t reveal anything about their “real” version numbers. Recently it’s mainly years, like “Visual Studio 2015” but it could be numbers which don’t correspond to the products’ internal version numbers.

As a developer, you often really want to know what the internal version of a product is. For instance, you want to understand whether a version is a minor release to an internally identical core or a new major release.

This information, apparently, is scattered around the Internet, mostly in separate sources of data and not as one comprehensive source. This is not always the case, but it is most of the time.

I’ve compiled several unified lists of several of Microsoft’s lines of products that are relevant for developers – the most prominent ones: Windows, Visual Studio, .NET, SQL Server.

If you find any mistake or have an update, I strongly encourage you to update me and I’ll update this list so it will be relevant for the long-term of course, and not serve as a one-time-but-irrelevant-as-time-goes blog post.

Windows

Known Name Version Latest Build / Service Pack Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195: Service Pack 4 Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600: Service Pack 3 Windows Server 2003

Windows Server 2003 R2 5.2 Build 3790: Service Pack 2 Windows Vista 6.0 Build 6002; Service Pack 2 Windows Server 2008 6.0 Build 6002: Service Pack 2 Windows 7 6.1 Build 7601; Service Pack 1 Windows Server 2008 R2 6.1 Build 7601: Service Pack 1 Windows 8 6.2 Build 9200 Windows Server 2012 R2 6.3 Build 9600 Windows 8.1 6.3 Build 9600; 8.1 with Update Windows 10 10.0 Build 1703 (10.0.15063.138)

SQL Server

Known Name Version Latest KB / Revision SQL Server 2000 8.0 8.00.2305 SQL Server 2005 SP4 9.0 9.00.5324 SQL Server 2008 SP4 10.0 10.00.6547 SQL Server 2008 R2 SP3 10.0 Database Engine Services: 10.51.2500.0

Management Studio: 10.50.6542 SQL Server 2012 SP3 11.0 11.0.6594.0

SP3 CU #8 SQL Server 2014 SP2 12.0 12.0.5540.0

SP2 CU #4 SQL Server 2016 SP1 13.0 13.0.4422.0

SP1 CU #2 SQLocalDB 11 11.0 Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (11.0.5058.0) SQLocalDB 12 12.0 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 (12.0.2000.8) SQLocalDB 13 13.0 Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (13.0.4001.0) SQL Compact Edition Lots of versions Comprehensive list here

Visual Studio

Known Name Version Latest KB / Revision Visual Studio 6 6.0 Service Pack 6; 6.0.3790.0; VB6.0-KB290887-X86.exe Visual Studio .NET (2002) 7.0 Service Pack 1; KB837234 Visual Studio 2003 7.1 Service Pack 1; KB918007 Visual Studio 2005 8.0 Service Pack 1; KB932232 Visual Studio 2008 9.0 Service Pack 1 Update; KB974479; 9.00.30729.1 SP Visual Studio 2010 10.0 Service Pack 1; KB983509; 10.0.40219.1 SP1Rel Visual Studio 2012 11.0 11.0.61030.00 Update 4 Visual Studio 2013 12.0 2013 Update 5 (2013.5); 12.0.40629.00 Visual Studio 2015 14.0 14.0.25431.01 Update 3 Visual Studio 2017 15.0 15.0.26403.3

.NET

Very dynamic, and now contains multiple modules such as .NET Core, .NET Native, .NET Framework, .NET Compiler Platform and more.

The latest release .NET Framework version (basically before the above partitioning introduced in what’s still called vNext) is Microsoft .NET Framework 4.7. It is preinstalled on Windows 10 Creators Update. It is currently not available for installation on earlier versions of the Windows operating system.

At this stage, I prefer to link to this quite comprehensive and Wikipedia-maintained up-to-date list of .NET versions.