Announcement: AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2022 will require a minimum version of 17.7

[awschristou]

In November 2023, we are planning on increasing the minimum required version of Visual Studio 2022 to 17.7. This will allow us to add features to the Toolkit that leverage newer portions of the Visual Studio extensibility model.

Update: As of Toolkit version 1.45.0.0 (changelog), version 17.7 or newer of Visual Studio 2022 is required.

Information about Visual Studio 2022 release notes can be found at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022/release-notes

If you are still using a Visual Studio 2022 version in the range 17.0 - 17.6, you are encouraged to update to the latest version of Visual Studio, as well as the AWS Toolkit extension, which is available on the marketplace:

• AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2022

If you continue to use an earlier version of Visual Studio 2022, you will be able to install older versions of the AWS Toolkit, however those versions of the Toolkit will not receive updates.

Here is how this change will take place:

• in mid-to-late November, an upcoming release of the Toolkit (update: v1.44.0.0 - changelog) will show a dismissible info bar indicating that the next Toolkit release requires Visual Studio version 17.7 at a minimum. This will only be displayed if the version of Visual Studio is detected as a lower version. This will be the last version of AWS Toolkit that can install on earlier versions of Visual Studio 2022. This warning will be noted in the Toolkit release notes.
• The final version of the Toolkit that is compatible with versions 17.0 - 17.6 of Visual Studio 2022 can be found in the Releases section of the repo: https://github.com/aws/aws-toolkit-visual-studio/releases/tag/v1.44.0.0