Autodesk recommends Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 for compilation of Maya 2016 plugins. Assumed I’ve installed a newer release of Visual Studio (like 2013), can I still compile Maya 2016 plugins with this release or would I run into trouble sooner or later?
You’ll need to have the compiler and the C-runtime from 2012 to compile plugins and python extensions for both Maya 2015, and 2016.
However you can have both installed at the same time (as long as you’ve got the disk space).
There is supposed to be some way that you can set a solution to use an older compiler if its installed, that way you can just use the one frontend, but I’m not all that savvy when it comes to the particulars of visual studio.