Somehow they switched windows-2025 to Visual Studio 2026 although they introduced a separate runner for that. I wouldn't be surprised if it was done accidentally since GitHub has been prone to plunders over the past few months.

See actions/runner-images#14004.

Even without the breakage specifying the generators explicitly was unnecessary.

The release build might still be broken as we use the solution file which has a different file extension with Visual Studio 2026. Let's wait a bit to see what the feedback is on this behavior change before adjusting that workflow.

It appears this was actually intentional and is here to stay: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-02-05-github-actions-early-february-2026-updates/#windows-server-2025-with-visual-studio-2026-image-now-available-for-github-hosted-runners.

But somehow none of what was communicated actually aligns with what is happening and is documented - so I will give it another few days before fixing the release build and simplecpp since I do not want to flip-flop on this.