Microsoft just released the latest version of the Visual Studio IDE: Visual Studio 2017. We’ve installed the community edition here and run some basic tests on SilverLining and Triton.

The good news is that it appears Visual Studio 2017 is compatible with libraries built for Visual Studio 2015. Usually a new version of Visual Studio means the Visual C++ compiler gets a major version update – but that didn’t happen this time. Visual Studio 2015 is “VC14”, and Visual Studio 2017 is just “VC141”. We were able to open our sample solutions and projects for Visual Studio 2015 in Visual Studio 2017, affirm we wanted to start using the new toolset, and everything just worked. Our existing VC14 libraries and DLL’s seem to work just fine, without modification.

So, it would seem that we don’t need to start shipping new library, DLL, and solution / project file builds specifically for Visual Studio 2017. Just keep using the VC14 resources created for Visual Studio 2015 and you should be OK. That’s great, as our SDK’s were getting pretty large already.

If you do migrate to Visual Studio 2017 and experience any problems that seem related to the move, please let us know.