Recently, I installed Visual Studio 2017 RC. This also installed the latest version of .NET Core. This also meant I started to run into the error “No executable found matching command dotnet-projectmodel-server” when opening .NET Core projects in Visual Studio 2015. To work around this, you need to specify a SDK version in your global.json file for your VS2015 solutions.

Add the global.json file here.

My global.json file simple consists of the SDK node with the version I’m targeting.

Now I can run both VS2017RC and VS2015 .NET Core projects side-by-side.

Switching without Global.json

You can also work around this without creating a global.json. This method is a bit hackier but works all the same. In the C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk folder you will have versions of all the SDKs you have installed. If you rename the newer SDK folders to old version numbers, Visual Studio will pick up the latest version and function correctly. So for running Visual Studio 2015, my folder structure would look like this.

For Visual Studio 2017, my folder structure would look like this.