I am currently using Visual Studio 2015 for programming ASP.NET Core applications. I have the following questions regarding installing Visual Studio 2017:
From page Visual Studio 2017 Platform Targeting and Compatibility
Compatibility with Previous Releases Installation
You can install and use Visual Studio 2017 alongside previous versions of Visual Studio, including Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013, and Visua Studio 2012.
So yes. you can install them without any problem.
VS 2013, VS 2015, and VS 2017 all work well side-by-side. VS 2012 can be a little dodgy on Windows 10, but should also work side-by-side. In theory VS 2010 should also work side-by-side with those, but I've run into quirks in the past with them interfering with one-another.
Projects should round-trip between 2015 and 2017 generally, although there are some one-way upgrade scenarios.
Note that if you really just need the older compiler toolset for some reason, you can also install VS 2017 and select the optional component Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.140 which installs the older v140 compiler which you can still use with the VS 2017 IDE. That said, there's not a lot of reason to do this since the VS 2015 & VS 2017 C++ standard libraries are binary compatible so you can mix them in a project.
See this blog post for information on VS 2017.
It sounds like you have done some projects in 2015 already, so you will probably want to keep it.
Once you open a project in a new version, it will try to upgrade the project and then you can't go back.
However, if you have multiple versions installed at the same time, when you try to open a project, say, from Windows Explorer, it will open it with the "Visual Studio Version Checker" and will look at the project file and determine which version to open it in.
Bottom line, if you have the hard drive space, there is no reason to not install them alongside each other.
In the past, it was recommended to install them in sequential order if you are installing multiple versions, but it doesn't sound like this is an issue for you and I don't know if that is even a problem anymore as it has been several versions since I have had to deal with that.
Good luck!
If you have no reason to keep VS2015 in your computer I would suggest uninstalling it. I uninstalled VS2015 after installing VS2017 and later noticing that I was still using an old taskbar shortcut to VS2015. So I was inadvertently still using VS2015. Maybe some special cases require keeping older versions of VS along side the new version, but for the rest of us, I say, uninstall!
1,2,3. Visual Studio 2017 has more features over 2015 and it contains 2015's current features so you don't need 2015 alongside 2017. Just stick with 2017. And I don't think you will have any problems while opening 2013 and 2015 projects with Visual Studio 2017.
