Does Visual Studio 2015 RC work in parallel with Visual Studio 2013

Question

I'm having this question since a month and I'm not able to test it, so i want to ask here if someone have met this situation. Since there is no official release of the new Visual Studio 2015 and it's on RC now ,I'm interested in does someone know if VS 2015 and VS 2013 could work together? Will be the code "infected" if both sides commit something together? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

In theory yes, in practice no (or at least your results may vary). VS is designed for side by side installations. For consultants it is very common to have multiple versions of VS installed to match the environment of the client.

That being said, RC is pre release software and bugs are to be expected. Nobody can guarantee you won't have problems. VS is a huge and complex codebase. Throw in the number of permutations of possible plugins and extensions as well as environment conditions and there is always a chance of breaking. Just because it didn't blow up on someone else's system doesn't mean you won't have problems.

When I installed VS 2015 CTP6 a few months ago it broke an install of VS 2013 on the same machine. VS 2015 CTP6 installed without error but trying to "login" (Microsoft's new annoying way to infect all software with a user login) hung and became unresponsive. Upon restart devenv.exe complained about corrupted user settings and even before I tried I had a bad feeling that VS 2013 blew up as well. I was right and it took a reinstall to get it working.

Now on the other hand I installed VS 2015 RC side by side on a machine with VS 2010, 2012 and 2013 without any issue. Does that mean you are guaranteed to not have a problem? Of course not. It is pre-release software. If this is a mission critical machine and you don't have the time to potentially spend a few hours reinstalling VS 2013 I would install it in a VM. If it isn't mission critical or you have the time to reinstall if necessary then roll the dice. Honestly you "should" be fine, the RC is pretty stable but you never know.

Answer 2

You should be fine - you'll be using an existing code-base and as long as you don't change the .NET version in the properties, it will compile the same.

However, if you do want to check out the new vNext solutions, you'd have to specifically select the project template in the new project wizard.

These projects are run on the new DNX runtime (which is still evolving and subject to change)

Answer 3

Side by Side. Visual Studio 2015 (even RC) works seamlessly side-by-side with Visual Studio 2013.

See BUILD 2015 News: Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio 2015 RC, Team Foundation Server 2015 RC, Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 or the official guide in the documentation

you might follow the links inside for details about how to configure the target language specific frameworks.