I recently had to install and work with Visual Studio 2008 and VS 2010 at work. I was pleasantly surprised at how they behaved compared to the newest versions. Much faster and more lightweight; just how I like it.

Does anyone dev with these older versions? I'd like to know the pros and cons. I don't do any web dev, but there must be a reason why many people, and even Casey in the stream, are using the newer versions. Thanks.

Well, now you know why nothings is still using Visual Studio 6 :)

I cannot use anything lower than VS2013, because VS2013 added compound initializers for C. Its a C99 feature that allows to initialize C structures in a very nice way. I use it all the time. And at that point it doesn't really matter is it VS2013, VS2015 or 2017...

Also using older versions of VS will limit you what kind of intrinsics they support (AVX2, AVX512, etc..). And newer version optimize better, if that is something very relevant to your code.