Breaking Change: SDK images will be upgraded to Visual Studio 2026 BuildTools

[lbussell]

Visual Studio 2026 was released on 2025-11-11. With the new release comes a few changes to the .NET Framework SDK container images. These changes are planned for release on 2025-11-18.

Planned Changes

The following images will be updated:

• mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/framework/sdk:4.8.1-windowsservercore-ltsc2025
• mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/framework/sdk:4.8.1-windowsservercore-ltsc2022
• mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/framework/sdk:4.8-windowsservercore-ltsc2019

The 4.8-windowsservercore-ltsc2016 image will not be changed, since Visual Studio 2026 does not support Windows Server 2016.

Visual Studio Build Tools

The Visual Studio Build Tools inside the SDK image will be updated from 17.14 to the latest version, 18.0.

Visual Studio Test Agent

The Visual Studio Test Agent is not supported with Visual Studio 2026. It will be removed and replaced with the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.TestTools.BuildTools component. You can continue to use vstest.console.exe to test MSBuild projects and dotnet test to test the newer SDK-style project format.

.NET 10 SDK

The .NET 9 SDK will be replaced with the .NET 10 SDK. The .NET 10 Runtime will also be included in addition to the .NET 8 and 9 runtimes that are already present in the image.

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If you encounter a breaking change or other issues and need to quickly unblock yourself, you can reference the previous version of the image by using its full version tag (e.g. mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk:4.8.1-20251014-windowsservercore-ltsc2025).

Related pull requests:

• Update Visual Studio tools to 2026 and add .NET 10 Runtime to SDK images #1271