CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio-2013.net-3.5asp.net-3.5visual-studio-2017
ChrisA
ChrisA

Reputation: 4193

Is Visual Studio 2017 RC backwards compatible with Visual Studio 2013 solutions?

We have several VS2013 solutions all targeting .NET 3.5, with several WinForms projects, an ASP.NET Web Application, and a Windows Service. Mostly VB.NET with some C#.

These projects all worked fine in VS2013 and VS2015 - we could open, work on, save, compile and run them, in both versions of VS.

We didn't move to VS2015 in the end because it was so buggy - VB.NET Edit & Continue was hopelessly broken, and Intellisense didn't work so well either.

So now we're contemplating skipping 2015 and moving straight from 2013 to 2017, but again we're nervous, wanting to run them in parallel for a while until we feel 2017 is ok. It's a two person team, and one would be sticking with VS2013 while the other one develops with VS2017.

So: can you use both VS2013 and VS2017 to work on the same codebase in the same way that you could with VS2013 and VS2015?

We aren't yet using features that come with later versions but we do want to move to the newer IDE as a precursor to moving to more recent framework versions and language features.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2090

Answers (1)

Jimmy
Jimmy

Reputation: 28416

The compatibility between different versions of VS should remain the same - that is, VS2017 and VS2013 should work together as well as VS2015 does with VS2013. The usual caveats apply: any globally installed packages/frameworks from VS2017 might have unintended impact on VS2013 (for example, if VS2017 installs a newer version of the .NET Framework that has an unintentional behavior change).

In general, VS2017 ought to be very compatible with other versions of VS. Most of the install payload is now local to that VS installation with lessened impact to the system (no GAC'ed components, no registry keys, etc), so the impact to your box should be less than VS2015.

Obviously, if you add functionality to your solution that's from VS2017 and isn't back-compatible to VS2013, an upgrade will be forced. But that's also no different than VS2015 was.

Upvotes: 3

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