Can I work in my ASP.NET Core 2.1 Preview 1 project in Visual Studio 2017 (15.6.3) which is released today? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releasenotes/vs2017-relnotes#15.6.3
I've been using Visual Studio 2017 Preview version to work on my ASP.NET Core 2.1 project up until now -- as this article suggests: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/02/27/announcing-net-core-2-1-preview-1/
I want to know if I can switch back to the stable version of Visual Studio 2017 now.
When launching a solution that contains a .NET Core 2.1 project with Visual Studio 15.6.3, there will be the following message:
The link there goes to this page:
.NET Core 2.1 Preview 1
To create or open applications targeting .NET Core 2.1, Visual Studio 2017 15.7 or newer is recommended. Right now 15.7 is only available as a preview, so please use the latest Visual Studio 2017 Preview.
Visual Studio 2017 15.6 supports creating and opening applications targeting .NET Core 2.1, but it contains known issues so 15.7 or newer is recommended.
Visual Studio 2017 15.5 does not support creating or opening applications targeting .NET Core 2.1.
So you can absolutely use VS 15.6 for .NET Core 2.1 projects. In fact, just today I was working on a .NET Core 2.1 project (actually using a daily build), and I did not encounter any issues with my non-preview Visual Studio.
But there may be issues, e.g. with tooling related to scaffolding, so you should be prepared that things might break. But for normal work on an existing code base, there shouldn’t actually be any problems. And you could always fall back to the dotnet CLI for the things that don’t work.
tl;dr With the 15.6.3 update, there is still no official support for .NET Core 2.1 projects but there may be very few issues that will prevent you from actually working with it.
