How do I install a previous version of Visual Studio 2019 Community?

Question

I found a bug in the latest version of VS Community (16.7.0) which is preventing my solution from building, so I need to roll back to 16.6.5. However the only download link I can find has downloads for only Enterprise and Professional, not Community. How do I downgrade my installation of VS Community? It's completely unusable for me now because one of my solutions is failing to build even though there are no compile errors.

Answer 1

While the link shows Professional and Enterprise, I've tried it myself and it can install the Community version.

First fully uninstall Visual Studio 2019. Then download the Professional edition of the version you want and run it. In the "available" tab from the installer you'll find that it can install all 3 editions including Community of both 2017 and 2019, at the choosen version, regardless of the downloaded binary.

Note that this actually downloads the real installers from the web, thus while they work right now, we can't ensure they'll work in the future.

Answer 2

Here is the official source for all previous versions of all 3 product lines: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2019/history#release-dates-and-build-numbers

Answer 3

I had a similar challenge, where I needed an older minor version(16.5) of VS 2019 with Xamarin together with the latest and updated C++ features of 16.10 side-by-side , both Community.

What worked for me was:

1. On another machine without any VS 2019 versions installed, download the vs_Professional.exe bootstrap file for the minor version you want and install in a custom folder name(eg 2019_16.5) the Community flavor by cancelling the workload selection, like @Alejandro describes in his answer here .
2. Copy the whole VS installation folder to the developer computer where you already have Visual Studio 2019 installed.
3. Copy the corresponding folder inside %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\Packages\_Instances\ to the same place on the developer computer.
4. On the developer computer, run the Visual Studio Installer. The new minor version should appear in the list. Choose Repair .
5. Modify and add the workloads and components you need for this installation.

I am not sure if step 2 is required or whether this just worked by chance for me and maybe can not be reproduced, but it might be worth a try.

Screenshot of my VS Installer