While I certainly agree that allowing to build with VS 2022 is pretty important as some people may want to use the newest version available I'm not convinced preventing compilation with 2019 is a good idea as per the several reasons:

1. VS 2022 does not offer us any visible benefits at this stage, and since it has been released only 4 days ago it is much less tested.
2. System requirements for Visual Studio 2022 are pretty unreasonable essentially preventing anyone running 32-bit versions of Windows or LTSC versions of Windows 10 (which are still in support for a long time) from contributing to NVDA without a good reason.
3. Historically I believe we tried to allow building NVDA under all versions of Windows which NVDA supports - I've no idea if this has been ever written down as a rule or was a coincidence.
4. If some corporation would like to contribute to NVDA Visual Studio is the only one of our dependencies which cannot be used for free potentially necessitating a purchase even though previous version is still perfectly suitable for building.

There would undoubtedly come a time when still allowing to build with VS 2019 would hold us back in some way and at this point we certainly should drop this support, but for now there is no real need in my opinion.
I personally believe this PR should be changed so that VS 2019 and up are accepted for compilation, with a mention in the readme that VS 2022 is recommended but compilation can be performed with 2019 and up.

4. If some corporation would like to contribute to NVDA Visual Studio is the only one of our dependencies which cannot be used for free potentially necessitating a purchase even though previous version is still perfectly suitable for building.

I don't understand this one. You can perfectly install several editions of Visual Studio side by side, including enterprise and community.

I personally believe this PR should be changed so that VS 2019 and up are accepted for compilation, with a mention in the readme that VS 2022 is recommended but compilation can be performed with 2019 and up.

I'm happy to do that, though I think it makes more sense to stick to Visual Studio 2019 on appveyor in this case and yet allow building with 2022. This ensures that, when we need to make a change that breaks Visual Studio 2019, we'll be notified automatically.

I don't understand this one. You can perfectly install several editions of Visual Studio side by side, including enterprise and community.

Sure you can. The problem is that if you are a enterprise there are several restrictions for using Community version of VS as mentioned in its EULA, therefore it is likely you cannot use Community edition legally in that case.

I'm happy to do that, though I think it makes more sense to stick to Visual Studio 2019 on appveyor in this case and yet allow building with 2022. This ensures that, when we need to make a change that breaks Visual Studio 2019, we'll be notified automatically.

Makes sense.

I updated the pr description.

• Build (for testing PR): https://ci.appveyor.com/api/buildjobs/ein4eyexu8m644hf/artifacts/output/

See test results for failed build of commit c9426ea68c

scons 4.3.0 is there, so we're ready to rock.

This was in fact reverted by #13387