Visual Studio 2015 And 2017 And 2019 -

One of the most powerful—and confusing—aspects of these three versions is that they are designed to run on the same machine.

The VS 2019 toolset is v142 . Critically, it maintains binary compatibility with v140 (VS 2015) and v141 (VS 2017). You can target Windows XP using the v141_xp toolset even from VS 2019. visual studio 2015 and 2017 and 2019