Microsoft is not offering Visual Studio 2022 Community for download anymore. Only Visual Studio 2026 is available. And UE5.7 GenerateProjectFiles.bat fails with “Visual Studio 2022 x64 must be installed in order to build this target.”
This effectively means I can not use UE5 without using expensive paid options like Visual Studio 2022 Professional which are still ironically available from Microsoft in old downloads. From what I can tell Visual Studio 2026 can support old build tools and can effectively act as an older version.
Could we please have a priority on supporting VS2026 compatibility for UE5.7?
The main Microsoft VS Community page only has downloads for 2026 or older 2022 Pro and enterprise. If anyone else can’t find Visual Studio Community 2022, I was pointed to this stackoverflow page.
It feels increasingly risky for Epic to rely so heavily on VS Community Build Tools as the zero cost entry point for Unreal development, especially when Microsoft can (and clearly does) change availability and distribution with little notice.
Being effectively locked out of building the engine because a specific VS version is hidden or deprecated is not a great place for a “free” engine to be.
It would be great if Epic invested more into toolchain independence… for example, making Clang a first class, default compiler on Windows.
Separate, but related: I wish Epic would invest a bit of resources into a proper UBT-based language server for VSCode. They experimented with this in the past but abandoned it, and today VSCode IntelliSense for Unreal is painfully slow and unreliable. Even though VSCode would still require VS build tools under the hood, better editor support would at least remove the need to install and live inside the full slow and clunky Visual Studio IDE.
I think the amount of people who actually want to put up with full VS IDE on daily basis is shrinking rapidly. Most people probably want just reliable compiler and fast, responsive editor.
I got the Visual Studio 2022 tool-chain to work in Visual Studio 2026 “Insiders” edition:
Have to agree with @Rawalanche, Microsoft has us dancing on ice all the time; Does the VS2026 Insiders edition break (they randomly do) before they publish the bug fix for the general release version? Forcing a, obviously, poorly tested IDE that doesn’t recognize it’s own installed build-chains (the supposed bug) onto their user base shows where the quality is heading… They could have actually waited until mid-2026 and done more QA (or at least unit tests using their own build tools which would have exposed the failures) and/or made 2022 easily available in the MS Store for those not able to use the lone “Happy Path” tool-chain available in v2026.
Hunting for alternatives when the ice breaks is an unacceptable waste of time. Wasted time installing/uninstalling v2026 and it’s components, before wasting more time researching, only to find it had a bug and would never work. Wasted more time looking for a valid v2022. Repeated the wasted time installing/uninstalling v2026 “Insider” edition components until I realized it was broken, as well; I found a simple hack for it, though. Burned over a day…
