projects: remove support for MSVC before VC10 (Visual Studio 2010)

[bagder]

With #8438 coming, I think its time to also prune some of the oldest ones.

[MarcelRaad]

Hmm, with greatly improved CMake support in the last months, maybe even start another call to remove the VS project files?

Personally, I've been able to use CMake instead of the project files everywhere since at least version 7.79.0 (62dbfa3) and have since switched to it.

[MarcelRaad]

If we want to keep them, I'd maybe be a little more conservative and only remove everything older than 2010 / 10.0. The older ones have more maintenance effort (or cannot be tested at all on modern systems) as they use a different format and later Visual Studio versions cannot open them without upgrading them to the current format, so in my opinion that would be the logical cut.

[jay]

I'm still using the Visual Studio 2010 project files.

[bagder]

I'm still using the Visual Studio 2010 project files.

Aren't the newer compiler versions also free to download and use? What's the reason to stick with a >decade old version?

[jay]

Aren't the newer compiler versions also free to download and use? What's the reason to stick with a >decade old version?

I have paid tiers of a few older versions of Visual Studio. When I was working I would often have to use a specific version, so I'm sure there are users of older versions. I'm currently doing most of my curl dev from a Windows 7 Enterprise computer (ESU) where VS2010 is more responsive than other versions.

[bagder]

I'm sure there are users of older versions

I think for anything that is older than 10 years, I think we can normally cut off support and users can either upgrade or deal with it however they want on their own. I feel less reluctant to do so if it risks "hurting" a core contributor such as you.

I'll adapt and instead do the cut so that VC10 and later are kept.