• Context: [Windows] windows-latest and windows-2025 image-label will use Windows Server 2025 with Visual Studio 2026 image in June 2026 actions/runner-images#14017

In contrast, our entire build process depends on Visual Studio 2022. We have several options:

• GHA: Windows: run on Windows Server 2022 #10884 Disadvantage: pinned image may vanish one nice day
• GHA: Windows: explicitly install Visual Studio 2022 (again) #10881 Disadvantage: longer build time (but that's overshadowed by longer Linux build time)
• Fix building with Visual Studio 2026 (while keeping support for VS 2022) #10878 Disadvantage: we have to either support multiple VS versions or switch to v2026

Tasks

• Add VS 2026 compatibility to the build scripts in this repo (TBD: should they continue to work with other versions?)
• Update the GitHub runner image to a newer version as it was downgraded by GHA: Windows: run on Windows Server 2022 #10884 as a workaround for GitHub changing the VS version in the windows-2025 image.