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It seems that I can open a VS 2013 solution file in VS 2015. I've a few questions regarding backwards compatibility:

  • Can a VS 2013 solution be maintained in VS 2015 safely without losing the capability to work on it in VS 2013?
  • Can a VS 2015 solution be maintained in VS 2013?

I can try it out all myself, but I would like to know if there are some documented caveats I should be aware of.

Jonn
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    If you can try, then do so... – leppie Jul 21 '15 at 07:12
  • First bullet vaguely feasible. Second one I doubt very much. Note that VS2013 doesn't implement the whole C++11 standard, e.g. constexpr, delegated constructors are missing. – Bathsheba Jul 21 '15 at 07:16
  • @leppie I didn't expect that I would be able to run a 2013 solution without conversion in 2015. (This is a first for VS I think) I'd like to know if this is documented somewhere and I couldn't find relevant documentation through Google. Trying it out entails a few days / weeks worth of checking. – Jonn Jul 21 '15 at 07:37
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    @John that's not true 2012 and 2013 were cross compatible and i believe 2010 and 2012 were too (less certain on this one, very certain on 2012/2013). The biggest part you left out of your question is whether C# **6.0** used in VS2015 is cross-compatible – Chris Marisic Jul 23 '15 at 20:39
  • Ah. I see. I didn't get to use 2012, and I totally forgot that that version existed. – Jonn Jul 24 '15 at 00:24

2 Answers2

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I finally found official docs on files supported when upgrading solutions in Visual Studio in the MSDN article Porting, Migrating, and Upgrading Visual Studio Projects.

The key takeaway here is in the opening 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 of the versions. You can transfer projects and files among the versions as long as you don't add features that are not supported by one of the versions.

You can run the same solution in different versions of Visual Studio as long as you don't implement a feature in a higher version that 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 well.

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

Jonn
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I feel this is a legitimate question; I've not seen any official information from Microsoft regarding round-tripping solutions between the two IDEs, other than to "assume it works".

From my personal experience in the last 24 hours, "upgrading" the solution file with VS2015 causes no harm in and of itself; it changes the version number in the solution file and it re-sorts things but it doesn't add/remove anything else.

It will try and change some csproj files if they are tagged with an older tools version, but things still compile.

Unfortunately, we have made little progress with VS2015 because we rely on Microsoft fakes for stubs, and there appears to be at least one bug with that tool that is stopping us from continuing (see Visual Studio 2015, Microsoft Fakes and System.Security.Claims.Claim).

Community
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BrettJ
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