Isn't it true that I can install multiple versions for Visual Studio?

Question

At work I have been having a lot of problems with my work desktop. For example, last Monday I had 5 Blue Screens of Death. Then on Tuesday I had four BSODs.

I told my desktop support about this back in November 2024. During the Christmas break, they reimaged my machine. But as I said, the problems have continued. So, last Friday they reimagined my machine again, only two months after having done it previously.

One thing I have done for many years is had multiple versions of Visual Studio installed on my desktops and laptops. Normally, just two versions of VS. For example, before they reimagined my machine, I had VS 2019 Enterprise Edition and VS 2022 Enterprise Edition. I have never had any problems with this set up.

However, my Deputy Chief Security Officer is convinced that having multiple versions of VS on my machine is exactly why I am getting multiple BSODs each week. I know that over the years I've seen posts in places like here, and on Stack Overflow, etc., all saying that there are no conflicts installing multiple versions of VS on a machine. I have taken those for granted.

But I know that my Deputy Chief Security Officer will take comments in forums of not having any problems with multiple versions of VS on the same machine to either be wishful thinking or you are outright lying. So, I am not asking you to tell me all is well. I want you to point me to research you have done, proving that there are no problems or issues having multiple versions of Visual Studio installed on the same machine.

Answer 1

Your DCSO is wrong. VS has been, for a very long time, able to support both multiple versions and multiple editions of VS at the same time. I, and every developer in my company, runs multiple versions of VS, especially after a new major release. Furthermore I routinely bounce between editions. In fact on a daily basis I have both Preview and RTM versions of VS running at the same time. Even debugging at the same time. There are 0 issues with this. Never have I heard of anyone having BSODs from multiple VS instances and I know a lot of people who run this way.

It is important to remember that a BSOD can only be triggered by kernel code. That means whatever is crashing your machine is running in the kernel. VS doesn't run in the kernel and so, by itself, it cannot cause a BSOD. Of course if you're doing Windows device driver development then you're running kernel code that could crash. You might also have something installed that itself runs a kernel driver that could cause a crash. For web development. you might install custom tools like Fiddler that could cause BSODs with their virtual filter drivers as well.

The easiest way to research this is to actually identify the BSOD error. When you get a BSOD the error information is available. Specifically you want the bugcheck code. This points you to what is wrong. After that is the modules that are causing the crash. Often this is a filter driver or similar. This tells you what is crashing but not necessarily why. Windows will save the crash dump off temporarily. This is where WinDbg comes in. DOwnload it from the Windows Store and load up the crash dump. Then run the analyze commands to have it identify what is likely going wrong.

1. Install WinDbg from MS Store.
2. Load crash dump in WinDbg (default directory is: C:\Windows\minidump)
3. Run analysis commands: !analyze
4. Use the bugcheck code to tell you what is failing (e.g. bad memory, access denied, etc).
5. Use the callstack to see if there is some third-party library loaded.

The formal documentation is here.

In my experience crashes tend to be caused by either anti-virus or graphics drivers. If the error is in a third party component then uninstall it. If it is AV then check with your AV provider as they can have issues with debuggers. McAfee used to be notorious about it. If it is a graphics driver problem then check with them. Note that VS does support hardware acceleration and a faulty graphics driver can crash the system. Switch VS to software only mode if that is the case.

Answer 2

Hi @Rod Falanga ,

If the BSODs appear each week, I believe that the easiest way to prove this is to test to install only one version of VS on the machine, see if the BSOD appears again. If it appears again, that means the BSOD issue is not caused by having multiple versions of VS on your machine.

As Visual Studio and Windows OS update from time to time, Visual Studio are designed to support installing side-by-side, it’s hard to say if BSOD is caused by Visual Studio, Windows OS, multiple installed VS, the specific version of VS or Windows OS. However, VS indeed uses some Windows features.

We may need to try to use some tools to check the log, event and stop code to find out the root cause, so that we can prove that this issue is or is not caused by having multiple versions of VS on one machine. But in this case, there’s no need to prove, as the root cause has been found out.

If you accept to try to find the root cause, you can start to check from the Stop Code. When you get Blue Screens of Death, the Stop Code should appear, try to copy it and try the troubleshooting steps shared here: Resolving Blue Screen errors in Windows. If necessary, try to contact Windows team, they may share you some tools to get the log files and locate the cause.

If you want to ignore the root cause, but focus on VS, you can try what I mentioned above(install only one version of VS on the machine). Based on my experience, I usually have multiple versions of VS(VS 2017, 2019, 2022. Before, I used VS 2010, 2013 and 2015) installed. Either opening and using two different versions of VS at the same time, or installing extensions, packages, frameworks, I never get crashing(Windows)/Blue Screens of Death/BSOD issues.

Best regards,

Tianyu

---

If the answer is the right solution, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.