Deprecate support for Windows pre-10

[brodycj]

I think we should deprecate Windows pre-10 support and remove it from an upcoming release, as @janpio already proposed in PR #264.

@janpio what do you think?

[janpio]

Makes sense, but is a lot of work as removing the Win8.1 parts destroys quite a lot of the code and makes it even less readable. #264 stalled because of that.

[brodycj]

Thanks @janpio. I would like to take another look at this as I think we do not want to support 8.1 any longer than absolutely needed.

I am interested in cleaning up Windows 10 support as it is still needed by a major client.

[janpio]

Sounds good. If I could invest the time to tackle this, I would first get rid of everything obvious connected to Win8.1 and Phone, then see what is left and how it could be rewritten in a simplified manner - especially the MSBuild selection is absolute crap right now.

[janpio]

An interesting thing to decide is if VS15 should still be supported or if we drop everything but VS2017. Since VS17 Microsoft includes a vswhere executable at a known location that can be used to find the MSBuild location, which would make all the VS/MSBuild detection logic we have (reading registry, trying paths, bla) obsolete. This is our no 1 source of problems right now.

Also, do we maybe also drop Windows Phone 10? It is EOL and unsupported by Microsoft as far as I know.

[janpio]

I just went through the changes of https://github.com/apache/cordova-windows/pull/264 and I think most of them still make sense - it becomes clear which parameters can be removed, what warnings should be added, and quite a lot of the code and tests that can be removed. What the PR didn't cover was the cleanup phase and a sane MSBuild detection mechanism. But otherwise I am pretty happy how good it holds up, could definitely be a good idea base for starting a new branch to tackle this properly again.

[erisu]

I just want to point out that vswhere was first bundled with VS2017 version 15.2. It didn't actually come with the initial release of VS2017 version 15.0.

A recent setup of a Windows VM with VS2017 did not have vswhere. It was either a bugged install or an older version such as 15.0 was installed. After I ran an update, with the VS installer, vswhere was installed.

Could possibly bundle vswhere within our platform as well, if there is no issues against Apache with bundled binaries. https://github.com/Microsoft/vswhere/releases

[janpio]

+1 on just including it (if possible) - would make stuff so much more stable.

[timbru31]

We are archiving this repository following Apache Cordova's Deprecation Policy. We will not continue to work on this repository. Therefore all issues and pull requests are being closed. Thanks for your contribution.