Need advice on which version of Visual Studio to get

#1

I’ve been working with JUCE on Mac OSX now for almost 3 months. I’ve got some test projects underway, and I’d like to test on Windows before I go too far down the road.

Which version of Visual Studio should I get, to use with the latest version of JUCE?

I assume that would be Visual Studio 2019, but looking at the website they seem to have a free version named “Visual Studio 2019 Community”, and then a paid version “Visual Studio 2019 Professional”.

Will the free version work without any issues? I absolutely don’t mind paying for the Professional version if it’s going to make development and my life easier. :wink:

(Using a fresh install of Windows 10 x64.)

#2

That is all you need.

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#3

Just need to install the right features/options. At one point they even dropped C++ from the default Visual Studio install, not sure if that’s still the case.

#4

If you want to support Windows XP, I think 2017 is the last version that supports it. If you don’t care about XP then just get 2019.

#5

Thanks!

#6

Note that which version of Visual Studio you use is independent of which platform you are targeting. For example, I am using Visual Studio 2019 Community, but in one project I am targeting the “Visual Studio 2017 - Windows XP” toolset (To build Windows-XP compatible plugins).
In another project using the same version of Visual Studio IDE I am targetting the latest compiler (2019) for 64-bit builds, but the XP-compatible target for 32-bit builds (becuase 32-bit users tend to use an older operating systesm). I believe it is now even possible to switch in (traditionally) Linux compilers like CLANG.

image

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#7

IIRC, the platform toolsets that are listed in that option are those that are found on the computer, but each version of Visual Studio only installs the toolset that corresponds to its version.

If you see older ones, that should mean that you had those versions of Visual Studio installed on your system at some point in time (or that you have installed those platform toolsets independently and explicitly in addition to the one that comes with the current version of Visual Studio).

That being said, I believe what @G-Mon meant is that the toolset for Visual Studio 2019 is the first one that comes without a variant that supports XP.
As you can see in your screenshot, the latest that also comes with XP support is the one for 2017

#8

You can install the 2017 toolset with VS2019. It’s an installer option.

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