Does Visual Studio 2015 support older versions of MVC?

Question

Does Visual Studio 2015 support the older versions of MVC:

• MVC3
• MVC4
• MVC5

Not all hosting environments support the newer versions of MVC, so to support needs of older infrastructure this is required.

If it is supported how do you create new solutions using the older MVC versions in Visual Studio 2015? By default new MVC projects are created as version 5.2.

Answer 1

Does Visual Studio 2015 support the older versions of MVC?

Yes, It support them just after a migration (for adding/supporting new features in IDE like Intellisense and etc).

how do you create new solutions using the older MVC versions in Visual Studio 2015?

This is not an intellectual action since the newer platforms have a lot of fixes and advantages rather than prior ones. Unless, you may be forced to use an older one due to lack of hosting support, In this case you can't Create an older version of MVC project by the IDE (VS 2015) itself, unless by adding older assembly references and some handy works in configuration based on your complete awareness of older required files and architecture, since the newer IDE usually don't have the previews references.

Note: The VS 2015 is just an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). You can run any MVC version on it (with above considerations), But the IDE's new features will be limited likely. For example, the result of MVC 4 migration in VS 2015 will be:

ASP.NET MVC 4 projects have limited functionality in Visual Studio Next. Commands such as Add Controller, Add View, Add Area, and Go to View/Controller are not available. Intellisense for Razor (CSHTML and VBHTML) files is limited to HTML markup. Please see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=320968 for additional information on how to upgrade an MVC 4 project.

Which suffers from the lack of Intellisense and etc. But you can still run/develop the project with it or another IDE like Visual Studio Code and debugging the projects will make sense here.

Answer 2

Visual Studio 2015 RTM supports MVC 5 and MVC 6 only; tooling and Razor support are missing for MVC4 and earlier versions. Note that MVC4 projects will be migrated automatically and should compile and run on VS 2015 RTM, but the editing experience in Razor views will be poor.
There has been significant negative feedback concerning this change since release, and the team is planning to ship MVC4 support for 2015 RTM. Watch the WebDev Blog for an official announcement soon.
The Send-a-Smile feature in Visual Studio 2015 is responsible for the rapid acquisition of this feedback and the decision to respond quickly. Consider using Send-a-Smile if feature changes impact you negatively.