###-tools-visualstudio.md

Proposal: Tools - Visual Studio 2017 (15.2) required

Status	Proposed/Accepted/Deprecated
RFC #	####
Submitted	YYYY-MM-DD
Dependencies	RFC #, #

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Summary

Declare Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 (15.2) as the minimal version supported.

Motivation

Visual Studio 2017 (15.2) was released on May 2017. This version allows to install side-by-side different versions of the MSVC toolset, it allows you to build binaries that are fully compatible with the ones built using older versions.

Visual Studio 2017 (15.2) includes wswhere application. This tool is needed Conan to locate Visual Studio installation and toolsets available (link to proposal required).

Proposal

Declare Visual Studio 2017 (15.2) as the minimal version supported.

Alternative Approaches

Conan migth need Visual Studio 2017 (15.2) installed, but it can target older versions (vswhere is able to find older installations too).

Detailed Design

Open issues

• Evidence of CLI changes (calling MSBuild or other tools), format changes in the .props files or the data available to them (used in Conan generators and toolchains). Besides locating the installation, is there any reason not to support older versions?

• MSBuild doesn't support long paths until version 16.0 (link).

Future Extensions