Opening Visual Studio 2017 projects in Visual Studio 2015

Question

I've moved on to Visual Studio 2017 RC, but we still have people working on Visual Studio 2015. Currently when I create a project on 2017, it won't work on 2015. When the project is opened on VS2015 I keep getting the yellow triangles saying that there's a problem. And it won't build.

The error message associated with the yellow triangles is that it can't find those files. I am thinking that the issue is because of the new .csproj file that VS2017 uses instead of the project.json file that .net core has been using until now.

I thought that the projects created on VS2017 were backwards compatible with 2015. I guess they are not. Does anyone know if there's any way to create a project that can be worked on both VS2015 and VS2017? Thanks!

Answer 1

The new csproj-based projects for .NET Core aren't supported in Visual Studio 2015. There's a discussion about it here, but the gist of it is:

Rich Lander [MSFT]

We are working to get the new .NET Core msbuild-based tools finished
and at RTM quality as quickly as possible. They will be supported in
Visual Studio 2017+ and will be shipped as RTM next year. The changes
are significant, including to Visual Studio components, making it
very challenging for us to support them in Visual Studio 2015.