I’m sorry, perhaps I did not make my situation very clear. I did not say we were planning on updating old software with a new engine version. That’s simply not a good idea. The systems I referred to are our development systems; that is, our development environment and workflow. We wish to use new engine features in future projects, not current ones.
As I stated in my original post, we should not be expected to switch to the community version when we are already making use of the Ultimate version of Visual Studio 2013. We are making use of testing and architecture tools in VS 2013 Ultimate that are only available in VS 2015 Enterprise. We cannot use the community edition; such a switch would cut us off from a feature set that we current use as part of our regular workflow.
There IS a reason not to update a piece of software when it will cost thousands of dollars to do so and the current edition is still fully functional. Microsoft still provides support and updates for Visual Studio 2013. I don’t consider two years to be a very long life span for a compiler, or any major piece of software for that matter.
Still, thank you for response. It does provide a workaround for the time being, although it will be removed in future versions. As helpful as that is, though, what I am really looking for Epic’s technical reasons behind the deprecation. I would to know exactly what it is that Visual Studio 2015 provides that 2013 does not which will prevent Unreal Engine from being compiled on it in the future.