Can Visual Studio Community 2015 be easily updated to Visual Studio Professional 2015

Question

I have Visual Studio Community Edition 2015 installed on my drive D:.

I recently got a 1TB SSD for my C: drive and wanted to move VS to that drive. Long story short

Answer 1

I personally know that when your email address subscription has professional your VS install using that email if community will upgrade on it's own to Pro.

Answer 2

(Disclaimer: I worked on Visual Studio 2015 including portions of the setup experience while at Microsoft)

It can, but it isn't as simple as entering an upgraded product key, you also need the media.

When you buy/license Visual Studio 2015 Professional or higher, you'll have access to the install media, usually an ISO file or vs_setup.exe web-downloader. Mount the ISO image and run Setup and you'll be prompted to upgrade (if I remember correctly). You cannot (to my knowledge) have a side-by-side install of Community and Professional Edition (unlike you can with the Express editions).

Personally I would just do a full uninstall of Community first, then a clean install of Professional - when I worked on the setup experience of VS2015 I logged a whole bunch of bugs that were experienced during in-version SKU upgrades (e.g. upgrading Community to Enterprise, then downgrading to Professional), such as project template item templates disappearing, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if these still caused issues - I don't think it's worth the risk.

Regarding Visual Studio 2017

Visual Studio 2017 now fully supports side-by-side installations of different SKUs (which is why the installation directory is %programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2017\Enterprise). So rather than doing an in-place upgrade from a lower SKU to a higher SKU, you install it as a separate install entirely. You'll need to manually move your settings and extensions over (or use the Microsoft Account-based settings synchronization feature).