How do I install an older release of Visual Studio 2017?

Question

I brought up a new VS2017 dev environment at work yesterday, which means I got the recently released version 15.3. I'm getting an internal compiler error on a VC++ project that nobody else in the organization is getting; everyone else is still on 15.2. To test my theory that the 15.3 update may have broken something, I want to install VS2017 15.2 (or even 15.1 or 15.0). But I can't figure out how to do that. When I run the 15.0 or 15.1 bootstrapper, it still tries to install 15.3.

I've already gone over this guide for creating offline installations but it doesn't say anything about getting an older release. I found a guide here that shows how to use a specific release with VS2015, but I can't find anything for VS2017.

My work gave me an MSDN account (Visual Studio Professional), which offers older bootstrapper downloads, but does not offer full offline installation downloads for older releases.

How do I install VS2017 15.2 (or 15.1, or 15.0) when 15.3 has already been deployed by Microsoft?

Answer 1

There is support for downloading a prior version, but evidently you have to contact support for the link. None of the links on any of the pages I could find within the VisualStudio.com site referenced it.

Installing an earlier release of Visual Studio 2017

Be sure to take the time to read the "[no]support policy" regarding "earlier" releases. Essentially, the day they released version 15.4, version 15.3.5 was no longer supported.

On another note, I have noticed many people seem to respond (here and on other similar postings) along the lines of "Why on earth would you want to reinstall the same version you were working with instead of the latest release?". Note that I am para-phrasing that to clarify the sentiments commonly expressed.

The reason is because TEAMS of developers need to be on the SAME version of the tool set. They have deadlines and cannot afford to drop everything and switch everybody to a new version of the tools that may or may not work correctly for them. Even if the developers were willing to take that hit to their productivity, usually their managers are not. This is why taking away the option to install the previous version the very same day you make a new release available is an unacceptable practice for Enterprise or Professional grade development software.

Another common reason is that when bugs have to be fixed in software, you often need to use the same, or very close to same, version of the tools to rebuild it after fixing the bug. The costs of regression testing after forcing a non-trivial upgrade on an entire software product or suite is unacceptable to most organizations. Upgrading may not even be an option due to contractual obligations.

Answer 2

It seems that based on this article that Microsoft do not offer a mechanism to download any version of Visual Studio 2017.

The https://my.visualstudio.com site offers bootstrap downloaders for 15.0 and 15.3 only. Intermediate versions such as 15.1 and 15.2 are not available as of September 2017.

I have a modest sized engineering team that would quite like to stay with 15.2 even for new starts and this is quite frustrating as we didn't capture an offline install of anything other than 15.0!