CUDA in Visual Studio 2015

Update September 2016: CUDA 8.0 is available, Visual studio update 3 is supported.
Update June 2016: CUDA 8.0 RC is available. Visual studio 2015 is supported, but update 2 is not yet included.

In this small post I will explain how you can use CUDA 7.5 in Visual Studio 2015. I don't claim to have full support for VS2015, merely using the VS2015 editor and compiling a VS2013 project. You will still need to have Visual Studio 2013 installed, with the CUDA toolkit extension.

On a separate note: Nsight does have support for VS2015, so no hacks required there!

What you need:

• Any C++ project using CUDA.
• CUDA 7.5 toolkit with VS2013 support installed (I only tested it with 7.5, but I can imagine other versions working as well)

In the project properties, make sure the project compiles for "v120", which is VS2013. 

To actually load the project in VS2015 having support for compiling CUDA code, we have to copy some files. Visual Studio uses targets to include several extensions for loading project files. We simply have to copy the VS2013 support to the VS2015 folder:

The CUDA 7.5 extension files for VS2013 are located in:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V120\BuildCustomizations

Find CUDA 7.5.props, CUDA 7.5.targets and CUDA 7.5.xml. 

If you simply copy them to the same folder for VS2015:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V140\BuildCustomizations

You can now load these projects in VS2015. 

My raytracer running from VS2015 using Nsight.