Hi, As you may know, Steve Dower put significant effort into rewriting the project files used by the Windows build as part of moving to VC14 as the official compiler for Python 3.5. Compared to the project files for 3.4 (and older), the new project files are smaller, cleaner, simpler, more easily extensible, and in some cases quite a bit more correct. I'd like to backport those new project files to 2.7, and Intel is willing to fund that work as part of making Python ICC compilable on all platforms they support since it makes building Python 2.7 with ICC much easier. I have no intention of changing the version of MSVC used for official 2.7 builds, it *will* remain at MSVC 9.0 (VS 2008) as determined the last time we had a thread about it. VS 2010 and newer can access older compilers (back to 2008) as a 'PlatformToolset' if they're installed, so all we have to do is set the PlatformToolset in the projects at 'v90'. Backporting the projects would make it easier to build 2.7 with a newer compiler, but that's already possible if somebody wants to put enough work into it, the default will be the old compiler, and we can emit big scary warnings if somebody does use a compiler other than v90. With the stipulation that the officially supported compiler won't change, I want to make sure there's no major opposition to replacing the old project files in PCbuild. The old files would move to PC\VS9.0, so they'll still be available and usable if necessary. Using the backported project files to build 2.7 would require two versions of Visual Studio to be installed; VS2010 (or newer) would be required in addition to VS2008. All Windows core developers should already have VS2010 for Python 3.4 (and/or VS2015 for 3.5) and I expect that anyone else who cares enough to still have VS2008 probably has (or can easily get) one of the free editions of VS 2010 or newer, so I don't consider this to be a major issue. The backported files could be added alongside the old files in PCbuild, in a better-named 'NewPCbuild' directory, or in a subdirectory of PC. I would rather replace the old project files in PCbuild, though; I'd like for the backported files to be the recommended way to build, complete with support from PCbuild/build.bat which would make the new project files the default for the buildbots. I have a work-in-progress branch with the backported files in PCbuild, which you can find at https://hg.python.org/sandbox/zware/log/project_files_backport. There are still a couple bugs to work out (and a couple unrelated changes to PC/pyconfig.h), but most everything works as expected. Looking forward to hearing others' opinions, -- Zach