Locked out of using UE5 because Visual Studio 2022 Community is not available anymore

General Feedback & Requests
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I did a computer reset (at worse possible time).

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?

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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.

which lead to Visual Studio 2022 Release History | Microsoft Learn and if you search for Community on that page you’ll find the following link buried in the page.

https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vs_community.exe

Hope this helps.

6 Likes
4

Your the goat you saved my life thanks

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Thanks a lot, my friend! This helps a lot.

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Thank you very much for sharing. I also reinstalled the system at a bad node

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Just ran into this as well.

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.

1 Like