I brought up a new VS2017 dev environment at work yesterday, which means I got the recently released version 15.3. I'm getting an internal compiler error on a VC++ project that nobody else in the organization is getting; everyone else is still on 15.2. To test my theory that the 15.3 update may have broken something, I want to install VS2017 15.2 (or even 15.1 or 15.0). But I can't figure out how to do that. When I run the 15.0 or 15.1 bootstrapper, it still tries to install 15.3.
I've already gone over this guide for creating offline installations but it doesn't say anything about getting an older release. I found a guide here that shows how to use a specific release with VS2015, but I can't find anything for VS2017.
My work gave me an MSDN account (Visual Studio Professional), which offers older bootstrapper downloads, but does not offer full offline installation downloads for older releases.
How do I install VS2017 15.2 (or 15.1, or 15.0) when 15.3 has already been deployed by Microsoft?
There is support for downloading a prior version, but evidently you have to contact support for the link. None of the links on any of the pages I could find within the VisualStudio.com site referenced it.
Installing an earlier release of Visual Studio 2017
Be sure to take the time to read the "[no]support policy" regarding "earlier" releases. Essentially, the day they released version 15.4, version 15.3.5 was no longer supported.
On another note, I have noticed many people seem to respond (here and on other similar postings) along the lines of "Why on earth would you want to reinstall the same version you were working with instead of the latest release?". Note that I am para-phrasing that to clarify the sentiments commonly expressed.
The reason is because TEAMS of developers need to be on the SAME version of the tool set. They have deadlines and cannot afford to drop everything and switch everybody to a new version of the tools that may or may not work correctly for them. Even if the developers were willing to take that hit to their productivity, usually their managers are not. This is why taking away the option to install the previous version the very same day you make a new release available is an unacceptable practice for Enterprise or Professional grade development software.
Another common reason is that when bugs have to be fixed in software, you often need to use the same, or very close to same, version of the tools to rebuild it after fixing the bug. The costs of regression testing after forcing a non-trivial upgrade on an entire software product or suite is unacceptable to most organizations. Upgrading may not even be an option due to contractual obligations.
It seems that based on this article that Microsoft do not offer a mechanism to download any version of Visual Studio 2017.
The https://my.visualstudio.com site offers bootstrap downloaders for 15.0 and 15.3 only. Intermediate versions such as 15.1 and 15.2 are not available as of September 2017.
I have a modest sized engineering team that would quite like to stay with 15.2 even for new starts and this is quite frustrating as we didn't capture an offline install of anything other than 15.0!
Apparently its possible to install a older version in parallel to a newer one. I just downloaded 15.6.7 from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/productinfo/installing-an-earlier-release-of-vs2017 and started the install - it didnt touch my existing installation 15.9.19
But the probably better solution is just to install the toolset which is available separately for each VC2017 release. See this intersting article:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/side-by-side-minor-version-msvc-toolsets-in-visual-studio-2017/
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I work in the production team in a petroleum refinery, neither me or anyone i, the department works in IT or software engineering, but we love our VBA macros.
In order to go beyond what one can do with VBA, I started doing some small projects using Visual Studio Express and VB.NET
These projects are getting bigger and bigger, and I am starting to feel limited by VS Express and I am therefore building a business case for a VS Professional licence (my company is too big for Community).
I'll go with a stand-alone licence, since the subscriptions are way overkill for what I do, but even the stand-alone licence is divided in two parts (https://www.visualstudio.com/fr/vs/pricing/).
You can either buy a licence for a fee of $500, or subscribe for $45 a month. Since I plan on using the software for at least a year, the one-time-fee is cheaper, and the only difference between the two is access to older and newer versions. Hence the questions:
Is the inability to use the pro versions of previous iterations of Visual Studio a big downside? Will I be able to work without big issues?
Are newer versions a must-have when they come out, or can I sit on VS2017 for a couple years without issues?
Usage of older versions of visual studio like 2013-2015 depends on projects /solutions that for whatever reason can not be migrated to a newer version of visual studio. In my experience usually companies which do not wish to purchase new licenses. I see no reason why you need the older versions.
As for the newer versions. The main reason I have seen for a visual studio upgrade is the usage of newer .NET versions. A version X of visual studio can only run .NET up till version Y. When version Y+1 of .NET comes out this means if you wish to make use of the new features/changes in .NET Y+1 you would have to upgrade .
Trying to run an old project in Visual Studio 2015. It was created in 2012 or 2013, I cannot remember which. I have uninstalled both programs as I was running out of space, and i think that is what caused this. I get the following options:
And I do not want to change the target, so clicking on the second option brings me to https://www.microsoft.com/net/targeting which I can't seem to find anything there that remedies the situation. Is there a way around this without reinstalling the old version of Visual Studio again? Will that even fix my problem? Thank you.
Just Reinstall Visual Studio. When you uninstalled previous version it caused this problem.
You could try doing a repair reinstall of Visual Studio 2015.
Another point to consider is that Windows 7 (the oldest version of Windows still supported by Microsoft) includes a Windows Update for the .NET Framework v4.6.1 categorized as an "Important" update. I have not confirmed with Windows 8, but I suspect it, too, includes a similar update. Windows 10 comes with .NET 4.6 to start with. That means that any up-to-date supported machine today will be able to run apps targeting any .NET version up to and including 4.6. I recognize that there may be other reasons to continue targeting an older .NET version, but I bring this up just in case the concern is support on client workstations.
Can I install Visual Studio Community Edition RTM and then Update 3?
Or, do I need to Install Update 1 then 2 then 3?
Yes, it is cumulative. Moreover, each time a new update is released, Microsoft immediately makes sure there is no access to any previous updates. All links to previous updates get redirected to the latest update. (More precisely, all links simply lead to the online installer, which always downloads the latest update).
This is a major PITA, BTW, since there's no immediate solution to new code-breaking bugs that Microsoft often introduces into new updates. Update 3 is quite problematic in that regard.
For this reason, if you already have Visual Studio installed, it is highly recommended to make a snapshot of your system before installing any further VS updates. That way you will always be able to revert to the previous version in case the new update is broken.
The VS install I downloaded (latest one) includes SP3.
So it appears that the current download of VS includes the latest SP updates.
I currently have Visual Studio v2003, v2005, v2008 installed on my system. Things work fine...no issues.
I now have to install Visual Studio 2010 on my system and just wanted to know if anyone has a setup like mine or knows if there are any potential issues with so many versions existing on a system.
Really don't have a choice to remove older versions as we have a lot of legacy products written in these old versions and we are not upgrading them to new versions, only doing bug fixes on them.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
VS2010 supports targeting on multiple versions of .NET Framework (i.e. 2.0 or later), which mean it is designed to support the projects that were built with VS2005/VS2008 so-called backward-compatibility.
So I think no conflict here between these versions,
I've found a nice Myths and facts about VS 2005/2008/2010, check out this link here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/ee679805.aspx
It should work.
I have vs2003, vs2008 and vs2010 installed and I see no issue (but vs2010 is not yet used for production code).
M.
All these versions of Visual Studio are independent.
You should have no problem (other than lack of disk space!) installing VS2010 as well.
Just make sure you install the service pack as well.
They cohabitate fine, I have a similar setup myself.
You should at least push for migrating away from 2003 and 2005 though, they use some pretty old technology, and pretty much everyone these days has .net 3.5 on their systems.
If you are able to use VS 2010 I would highly recommend you do for all new projects - even if you have to target an earlier version of .NET framework.
Keep the old versions of VS installed only for maintenance of projects that cannot be migrated to VS 2010 version.
By the way, the migration to VS 2010 is often very trivial and well worth an hour or two of effort!
I used to install betas freely and learned the hard way that I best only do that using a disposable environment.
What is your perception of the safetey of installing the Release Candidate version? Is it likely that when I go to install the final version that I will be faced with having to do ugly manual steps to get rid of it just so I can install the actual release version?
I just un-installed beta 2 from a machine I use to code on (not my main work dev PC though) fairly frequently. The uninstaller does a very good job of tidying up and only left behind the Visual Studio Tools for Office runtime. I then installed the RC and everything went fine and nothing seems to have broken. Based on the beta 2 uninstaller behaviour I expect the RC should uninstall nicely when RTM time comes around .
That said, the usual caveats that apply to all pre-release software still apply here. If the machine you're thinking of installing onto is mission critical then don't take the risk, use a VM or a machine you can afford the time to rebuild instead.