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Visual Studio 2015 provides backward compatibility with Visual Studio 2013

It seems that I can open the VS 2013 solution file in VS 2015. I have a few questions regarding backward compatibility:

  • Is it possible to save the VS 2013 solution in VS 2015 safely without losing the ability to work on it in VS 2013?
  • Is it possible to support VS 2015 solution in VS 2013?

I can try everything myself, but I would like to know if there are any documented reservations that I should be aware of.

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visual-studio visual-studio-2013 visual-studio-2015
Jul 21 '15 at 7:09
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Finally, I found white papers on the files supported when updating solutions in Visual Studio in the MSDN article Porting, Migrating, and Updating Visual Studio Projects .

The key takeaway here is in the first paragraph.

If you use Visual Studio 2015 together with Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2012 or Visual Studio 2010 SP1, you can create and modify projects and files in any version. You can transfer projects and files among versions if you do not add functions that are not supported by one of the versions.

You can run the same solution in different versions of Visual Studio if you do not implement a function in a higher version, which is not supported in a lower version.

This applies not only to VS 2015-2013 compatibility, but also to VS 2012 and VS 2010 SP 1.



As a side note, I came across this while trying to open my reporting projects in VS 2015. The article also provides a breakdown of compatibility between specific files between versions of VS.

+62
Jul 24 '15 at 0:34
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I believe this is a legitimate question; I have not seen any official information from Microsoft about round-trip solutions between two IDEs other than "assume this works."

From my personal experience over the past 24 hours, “updating” the VS2015 solution file does no harm to itself; it changes the version number in the solution file and re-sorts things, but does not add / remove anything else.

He will try to modify some csproj files if they are marked with an old version of the tools, but still compiles.

Unfortunately, we have made some progress in VS2015 because we rely on Microsoft fakes for stubs, and there seems to be at least one mistake with this tool that stops us from continuing (see Visual Studio 2015, Microsoft Fakes and System.Security .Claims.Claim ).

+6
Jul 21 '15 at 13:33
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