Proposed RFC Feature Upgrade Minimum Visual Studio Version to 16.11 and support 17

[mattiascibien]

Summary:

Upgrade the minumum supported Visual Studio Version to 16.11 as 16.7 and add support to Visual Studio 17.

Feature design description:

Microsoft is going to remove support for Visual Studio 16.9 in October 2022 and recently has released a new version (2022) that is able to compile and run most of O3DE without any issue but it is left out as the Project Manager is requesting specifically fot 16.x.

Technical design description:

• There is already an issue in the main o3de repo (Upgrade VS version to 16.11 and higher. o3de#7665) and a merge request (Updated Visual Studio Version to 16.11 and 17.0 o3de#7714) that implements this feature but I think that the build machines and the docs may need an upgrade.

What are the advantages of the feature?

• Adding VS2022 support may help with developer productivity as it has been upgraded to 64bits and therefore improving the overall performance of the IDE.

How will this be implemented or integrated into the O3DE environment?

• As seen in the merge request there is no need to change much of the code as only the parameters of the vswhere invocation are different
• VS2022 compiler is binary compatible with 2019 so there won't also be many changes in the produced binary.

[lemonade-dm]

@o3de/sig-core Doesn't have any objections to updating the minimum VS2019 version to 16.11 and adding official support for VS2022.

We want need to make sure that any any continuous integration nodes using VS2022 is targeting the v143 compiler toolset. CMake uses by default when the Visual Studio 17 generator is used.

[mattiascibien]

@o3de/sig-core Doesn't have any objections to updating the minimum VS2019 version to 16.11 and adding official support for VS2022.

We want need to make sure that any any continuous integration nodes using VS2022 is targeting the v143 compiler toolset. CMake uses by default when the Visual Studio 17 generator is used.

If you need any help in this I will be glad to be of service.

[amzn-changml]

I'm fine with this RFC, for the record. It's been merged in as of o3de/o3de#7714