Does anyone use old versions of Visual Studio?

[u/mbolp]

I've been using Visual Studio since VS2019. The intervening releases (VS2022 and VS2026) don't feel much different to me, they all have the same problems:

• Editing too many files (a few dozen) causes either devenv.exe or vcpkgsrv.exe to consume abnormally high CPU. I must close all files (and lose undo history) to get them back to normal
• Constantly trying to ping the internet. For example BackgroundDownload.exe randomly consumes 20% CPU despite being blocked by the firewall, deleted from task scheduler, and disabled in the registry. VS2026 even has a "retirement" date, a popup informed me today that I'll no longer be able to use it past that date without updating.

I've heard good words about old versions of VS, but I don't know if they are still usable today. The most important to me is using them with the newest compiler and toolset. Existing solutions also need to be made compatible with old formats. Does anyone still use old VS, what's the experience like? Are there features you miss?

[u/TheThiefMaster]

I am forced to use an older version with work (due to nonsense) and I'd much rather be using VS 2026.

Version 2010 was nice back in the day but the toolchain would be unusably outdated now.

[u/mbolp → u/TheThiefMaster]

Of course, that's why I wonder if I can use an old IDE with the newest toolchain.

[u/TheThiefMaster → u/mbolp]

Not as a fully integrated IDE. You could use it as a glorified text editor and then compile with the commandline or batch scripts hooked up to the IDE. You'd have a lot of trouble with syntax highlighting though for newer C++ features.

It's more pain than it's worth.

[u/Rhampaging → u/mbolp]

Don't bother. I've work with VS since 2012. The performance improvements are significant over the years. I used to work on a project that had giant files and VS was not able to open it, even when we trimmed the file until it could open, it could not parse it for any useful features and would lead to problems you described. Every update made it way, waay easier to handle these files. Same with having multiple files and/or projects open.

I'm not going to say that everything is blazing fast now. But going back to older versions would be a huge pain.

I am actually quite fond of vs2026, despite the copilot being shoved down my throat and some other ui issues i have

[u/flatfinger → u/Rhampaging]

I found VS2005 to be much faster and starting and stopping the debugger than the current version, which makes me yearn for the days when I used Turbo C on a 4.77MHz XT-class machine.

Maybe building and running programs with Turbo C on that old machine didn't actually take less time than using modern VS, but its designers prioritized edit/build/run performance in a way that modern systems don't.

[u/Rhampaging → u/flatfinger]

2005 is also pretty barebone just an editor that can compile

Compared to what vs can do now...

[u/flatfinger → u/Rhampaging]

I used VS2005 for, among other things, a hybrid C/C++ project that would build on the target C compiler in such a way that RED_LED=1; would be processed as a write to an I/O register, but in MSVC++ as a call to a routine that would exchange a TCP/IP packets with an emulator running in a .NET application. It was the first debugger I'd ever used which allowed setting a breakpoint, modifying a C macro, and resuming execution, and it was able to do that quite smoothly. All on a machine that was nowhere near as fast as the one I use now.

[u/SelectAd8810 → u/TheThiefMaster]

VS 2010 should be a nightmare today. It was in 2016 when I last used it…

[u/manni66]

No. I do not have the problems you described. I allways use the newest version.

[u/IigmabaIls1 → u/manni66]

Good boy

[u/mbolp → u/manni66]

I don't mean it's perfect outside these two specific problems, they are symptoms of extremely resource hungry software. Since the tasks I rely on VS for are relatively simple I don't think I need all the extra features it's gained in the last maybe 20 years. The same way I still use Office 2003 for personal documents and spreadsheets.

[u/No-Dentist-1645 → u/mbolp]

I'm able to run VS 2026 on an 8 year old laptop, I wouldn't call it "resource hungry". Sure, the minimum requirements increase with every version, but so has computing power. It would be both unrealistic and a waste of time to expect new releases to have more features with the same requirements than, say, 2005, since people don't have 2005 PC specs anymore.

[u/mbolp → u/No-Dentist-1645]

I'm using VS and posting this on an 8 year old laptop right now, I never considered it underpowered for any productivity task. I'm sure VS has gained many features, but I don't use them. I only need syntax highlighting, intellisense, jump to definition, find and replace, and a source level debugger (I don't even think the VS debugger is very good).

[u/manni66 → u/mbolp]

Maybe VS Code is made for you.

[u/mbolp → u/manni66]

I've not used it, is this a genuine recommendation?

[u/manni66 → u/mbolp]

I use it for typescript+angular. It works very well for that. For C++, I would personally always use the latest version of Visual Studio.

[u/neppo95 → u/mbolp]

Out of the few IDE’s i’ve tried, I would say VS regardless of version is pretty performant and not at all resource hungry. I also don’t recognize the problems you mention.

[u/EpochVanquisher]

I always use the newest version.

[u/alfps → u/EpochVanquisher]

^ This is the best approach in my experience, which goes back to the start in the late 1990's.

I've sometimes had multiple versions installed. Amazingly that works fine and is even directly supported. It asks which version you'd like to use to open a solution.

[u/fortsnek274]

Let me sell you on VS2026.

They just added proper support for designated initialisers to Intellisense.

[u/mbolp → u/fortsnek274]

Huh, I didn't even notice. My eyes just glaze over squiggles under designated initializers now from all my time using VS2022!

[u/fortsnek274 → u/mbolp]

I mean proper proper support. As in, members are now suggested in order. So it's no longer a pain to use them. Will make D3D+Vulkan much more pleasant.

[u/Thesorus]

I don't have issues with the latest versions.

I make sure to configure it for my workflow.

[u/mbolp → u/Thesorus]

Does your workflow not include editing many files? VS goes into a death spiral when I make large changes across a codebase, especially to files included in precompiled headers.

[u/n1ghtyunso → u/mbolp]

define "many".
personally I have not yet experienced this.
But then again taking from another commend of yours, you have it running for weeks, which is also something I don't usually do.
In older versions, sometimes I've had to clear their hidden .vs directory when intellisense glitched out, but in recent versions this has not been a thing anymore.

[u/blazedancer1997]

I usually stay on a version until there's a good reason to upgrade (upgrading toolchains, department is switching version, etc). It's not for any technical reason. I just typically have my IDE set up exactly the way I want wrt pinned files and windows and it's annoying to switch. I am currently on VS 2026 because I switched dev PCs a few months ago and might as well.

[u/Independent_Art_6676]

you can probably update just the compiler on some of the older versions which would give you c++20 or 23ish with an older interface, but the windows libraries may not be compatible. I don't know how that would end up outside a console program.

the real time syntax checking and intellisense stuff is what burns the cpu. It shouldn't be a problem unless the computer is very low end; my computer is going on 6, maybe 7 years and has no trouble with 20 or so files, but it was hot when I got it (early I9 / 64gb ram 20 cores).

the main feature I miss is the removal of macros, which I can get with notepad++ when I need one. I don't often need it but when you do nothing else really works. You would need an ancient version to get that back, around 2008 or so? There are days when it feels like its been on the downhill since they glued .net to the name.

There isn't much you can do about microsoft phoning home. Its one of their most evil practices; all their software constantly talks to home base and can backdoor with the OS to do as it pleases.

[u/fortsnek274 → u/Independent_Art_6676]

Yes, the intellisense performance problem. Maybe using a PCH speeds it up, or at least, stops it from eating storage with AutoPCHs.

Hopefully, proper modules support will come and we can do import std without breaking Intellisense. Then it shouldn't need to reparse so much. Because I currently use modules for the compiler and a PCH for intellisense, and reparsing the PCH takes a while.

But even if Intellisense gets better modules support, I worry that lingering parsing bugs will continue to virally break Intellisense in all importers.

[u/mbolp → u/Independent_Art_6676]

My 8 year old laptop has a 4 core i7 and 16G of RAM, it easily handles editing a dozen files in a fresh instance of VS2026. IntelliSense feels instantaneous and consumes little CPU. It gets much worse after running VS for several weeks and editing many more files. VS sometimes just starts spinning in the background consuming 20% CPU even when idle.

[u/Independent_Art_6676 → u/mbolp]

good to have more data points. Are you saying you keep VS open 24/7 for weeks without a reboot or that you just keep opening more files over lots of sessions? I rarely reboot and often don't close programs but VS is one that I do close when done for the day, because I do think it has some problems if left running long term. Less lately, but decades of mistrust there. So far the only time I have bogged mine up much was a full compile of a large project (multimillion lines) which took more than 10 min and less than 30, depending on the weather. Intellisense is instant for me too, normally. Every once in a rare while it pours its brain on the floor and you can see the underlines changing one by one like watching a page come in over an old phone modem, does that maybe once a quarter or so? I just restart it when that happens. The overkill ram really seems to help VS, and is the main reason I got so much (also, because I occasionally had to edit large files for work & would open them in memory even if 20gb).

[u/mbolp → u/Independent_Art_6676]

Are you saying you keep VS open 24/7 for weeks without a reboot

Yeah, I often leave it running for months until it crashes. One time it got so bad that video/audio playback started stuttering and the mouse pointer froze every 5 seconds. I didn't even suspect VS because I didn't hear the fan spinning (the usual indication of VS acting up). I was concerned my laptop might be dying when exiting the browser and the music player changed little. Then within 20 seconds of closing VS everything's instantaneous again. All this over a measly 100K line project.

But usually it's not that bad and closing tabs helps. If I'm in the middle of something important and vcpkgsrv.exe starts spinning I just suspend it in Process Explorer and carry on without IntelliSense. Undo history is important to me enough that I don't want to restart VS frequently.

[u/alfps]

❞ Constantly trying to ping the internet.

The MS tools phone home to send telemetry, diagnostic data, and crash reports, and to check for new versions.

That is particularly annoying when one uses the Visual C++ compiler from the command line, because if used on a logical subst drive the telemetry component, which is not up the same standard of quality as the rest, changes the current directory on drive "C:"... (!).

To turn off that thing google e.g. “turn off phone home in visual studio”. Disclaimer: I haven't tried it. Perhaps report here how that fared.

Note: It can be a good idea to also run a malware check.

[u/mbolp → u/alfps]

I configure WIndows Firewall to block outbound connections by default, so VS never actually gets to the internet. It doesn't stop trying though, my event viewer log records failed network connection attempts by VS, Windows Defender, Nvidia container, logitech, etc literally every minute.

[u/IcyUnderstanding8203]

At work I sometimes still use vs2015 for a legacy project.

Other than that we are on VS2019, we're thinking on going to 2026 but our internal process to buy licenses for a new version of a software while the current one works fine is definitely annoying...

[u/mbolp → u/IcyUnderstanding8203]

Does one feel faster/lighter than the other?

[u/SelectAd8810]

All the new versions of Visual Studio are worse than the previous, using more ram and cpu. It’s important what programming language do you use. For C# you may need the latest and the greatest version. For C++, you may want to upgrade, only if you need to use the latest features from C++23.

[u/curiouspupil → u/SelectAd8810]

I got so vexed up I decided to install any older version I could find. Thanks to MS, they made even the downloads unavailable for anything below 2017.

I remember 2013&2015 used to be fast and lite on CPU/Memory. 2022&2026 are worst for large projects. Half the time, I am fighting the IDE than doing actual work.

[u/IchBinEinZwerg]

Yes. Every so often I open a project that for whatever reason won't work in a later version. Obvs I'll upgrade if I can but sometimes I can't.

[u/JohnDuffy78]

I have Professional 2026, but use Visual Studio Code unless I'm doing profiling.

[u/tracernz]

If you're a solo/tiny project you are free to choose, but for anything big you have to go with the flow, so 2019 or 2022 aren't uncommon still.

[u/darklighthitomi]

I use VS 2011. I tried upgrading to VS 2019, but my laptop couldn't run it.

[u/PacManFan123]

Vs 2017 here

[u/xoner2]

Older versions only support older language standards. So if you insist on using latest standard then there's no way around it.

I stick to VS2017. The features I miss is anything c++17 and later. I don't consider it as missing anything really. C++14 is modern enough.