Safe to install Visual Studio 2015 Preview side-by-side Visual Studio 2013

Question

Is it safe to install Visual Studio 2015 Preview side-by-side Visual Studio 2013? Can I uninstall VS 2015 Preview if VS 2013 stops working?

UPDATE:

When I installed VS 2015 Ultimate Preview side-by-side VS 2013 Professional, I was able to use and uninstall VS 2015 Ultimate Preview without any issues.

When I installed VS 2013 Ultimate Trial side-by-side VS 2013 Professional, I was unable to open VS 2013 Professional. Some features from the Professional edition would not work in the Ultimate Trial (e.g. UnitTest had some strange error). After I uninstalled the Ultimate Trial, some settings from Professional disappeared.

Answer 1

From what I have read there is potential for things to break: https://stackoverflow.com/a/27040641/3710110

But the 2 can co-exist on a single machine quite happily. I am going to take the plunge tonight. I will come back let you know how I get on. I am running VS 2013 Update 4 on Windows 8.1 OS.

UPDATE 2015-03-16 I have been developing mainly self-hosting web applications in VS 2013 for the past few days with VS 2015 CTP 6 installed on the same machine. I have not ran into any showstoppers so far :)

Answer 2

Yes, different versions of Visual Studio work fine alongside each other. I have 4 or 5 installed right now. New versions don't interfere with older ones, because that would prevent developers from maintaining their existing code base without forcing them to migrate to the new IDE.

Answer 3

I never had issues to install and use different versions of VS side by side.

Its about Visual studio 2015 Release (should be fine for RC also) Microsoft says "You can install and use Visual Studio 2015 alongside Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio 2012. It can also be installed on top of Visual Studio 2015 RC without having to uninstall RC"

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-2015-compatibility-vs.aspx

Answer 4

Yes, it is safe to install Visual Studio 2015 RC side by side to Visual Studio 2013. Both run without any problem. However I wouldn't advice Visual Studio 2015 RC on a machine that has Visual Studio 2012 already installed.

I recently installed Visual Studio 2015 RC on a machine with Visual Studio 2012 already installed. After installing VS 2015 RC, I could not run VS 2012 projects on VS 2012 instance. However VS 2015 RC projects run without a problem.

To resolve the issue, I tried to restore file associations in VS 2012 as described here. By doing so, I managed to open a solution with all the projects having exclamation marks. I decided to uninstall VS 2015 RC which also removes some of the shared components from VS 2012 too.

Finally, I found a way to restore the removed shared components by running an update from this MSDN blog.

Answer 5

I've had issue with installing nugut packages when I install visual 2015. Before my 2013, I could install nugut packages correctly. After I installed 2015, I can no longer install any nugut package on the 2013 version. it complains that it cannot find the packages. But when i try it on the 2015, it works.