Advantages of Visual Studio 2022

357mag

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Are there reasons or advantages to using the latest version of Visual Studio? Which I think is 2022. I'm using 2015. But I'm just a hobbyist too.
 
In future, please use descriptive titles for your threads. If your question is specifically about the advantages of VS 2022 then the thread title should reflect that.
 
Every version of VS adds new features. I'm not sure exactly what was introduced with each new version but there are Release Notes available that will provide the highlights. The most obvious change is support for newer frameworks. I'm not sure what VS 2015 supports but I'd be fairly certain that it would support .NET 5 and later. Even VS 2019 doesn't support .NET 6 and later. That may not be an issue for you but you won't get support for newer language features either.

I would generally recommend using the latest version unless you have a specific reason to use something older. Given that the Community edition is free and you can have multiple versions installed side by side, there's generally little reason not to at least try the latest version. You can install VS 2022 and leave VS 2015 installed, then uninstall whichever you don't want later, or just keep both indefinitely. You should be able to open existing projects in VS 2022 and still open them in VS 2015 afterwards, so you don't really lose anything. I'm pretty sure that's true but, if prompted, be sure to create a backup anyway, just in case. You really ought to be using source control anyway, so any changes made by the newer version should be able to be rolled back if there's a problem.
 
My projects made with 2015 will not open in 2019 or I suspect 2022. You get a dialog box that says the 2015 projects were made targeting a different version of the .Net framework. They do give you two options as far as what you want to do to open the 2015 projects but I don't really know how to answer.
 
VS2015 came with .NET Framework 4.6 by default as best as I can tell. All versions below .NET Framework 4.6.2 are past end of life. This is likely what you are running into. Accept the upgrade to .NET Framework 4.8.x. As best as I can remember there are not many breaking changes that would affect most run on the mill developers -- except for the deprecation of older versions of TLS, and the switch over to TLS1.2.
 
It is probably the case that you just didn't select the required SDKs when you installed. Run the VS 2022 installer and check the individual components that are installed and make sure all .NET versions that you need are selected. That said, as suggested above, you really ought to target the latest version of .NET Framework unless you have a specific reason not to.
 
I installed 2022 and to my surprise it appears to be opening my 2015 projects. But the issue is I cannot open or find the code source file. There is one source file called Program.cs but that is not the file I wrote containing the source code that makes the project work.

I should add that when I load a console program the source code file is there. But when I load a Windows project I can't find the source code file.

If you research this you can find other people who have had the same problem. They can't find the source code file.
 
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What do you mean that you cannot find the files? Do you just mean that they are not listed in the Solution Explorer or are they not present in the actual file system folder? If they are not in the Solution Explorer but are in the folder then you can simply click the Show All Files button and then include them in the project, as has been the cases since well before VS 2015.
 
Show all files does not do it. I finally found the code source file, but the only way I could get to it is if I loaded the form for the program and double-clicked on of the buttons on the form.
 
Show all files does not do it. I finally found the code source file, but the only way I could get to it is if I loaded the form for the program and double-clicked on of the buttons on the form.

OK, I misinterpreted what you were saying, because you didn't describe it adequately. You said you could only find Program.cs so I thought that's all that was in the Solution Explorer. There wasn't a problem to solve.

If you double-click a form in the Solution Explorer, that will open it in the designer. That's always been the case. You can press F7 and that will then open the user code file, with Shift+F7 going back to the designer. If you want open the user code file without the designer then you can select the form in the Solution Explorer and press F7 or click the View Code button. You can also expand the form node and the designer code file node under that to get nodes for types (usually just the form but you can define multiple types in one file) and members of those types. You can double click a member to go straight to it in the appropriate code file (user or designer).

The current Solution Explorer was created some years ago as a combination of the old Solution Explorer and another window - Class View, I think. Not sure when that happened but it may have been after 2015.
 
Getting back to the installer where you can choose what gets installed, there is many SDK's and targeting packs. I'm not sure which ones to install if it matters at all. Plus on the right side of the installer there are optional things which you can choose to install. Three things are already checked by default. Should I just leave all that stuff the way it is? I'm not going to be distributing the few programs to all sorts of people. Maybe two people would get an .exe of something I wrote.
 
Assuming .NET Framework 4.8.2 and below:

If you are just going to give straight .exe files, then you will need to know what OS those people are using, and from that derive what version of the .NET Framework comes by default with that OS, as well as guess at what version they may have if they have been keeping up to date with Windows Updates.

If you are creating .MSI and setup.exe's, then you can pretty much choose whatever framework version you want, and have the setup download and install (or pull from your installation media) the needed version.

Assuming .NET (Core) 6.0 or higher:
You can build self contained .EXE's that have all the needed .NET assemblies all incorporated into the (huge) executable. In this case, your choice of framework version practically does not matter. The only thing that might mess things up is sometime in the future a vulnerability is found in your chosen version, and the AV you are using blocks apps running with that version. It has not happened yet, but I suspect that it will eventually happen.
 
Well, everything is need to be updated on time, means updated devices work better than previous version. Similarly there are a number of advantages to upgrading from Visual Studio 2015 to the most recent version i.e. Visual Studio 2022. These include improved performance, enhanced productivity features, better language and framework support, bug fixes and stability improvements, access to new tools and extensions, and a larger community support base. While Visual Studio 2015 may still be functional, upgrading to the latest version can offer a more efficient and up-to-date development experience.
Thanks
 

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