I can better answer your question if you provided more information.
Generally, you always can use a Visual Studio 2017, professional, enterprise, or community version. I guess you were asking about building your own user-defined routines on/linking other dependent libraries. If your dependent libraries are built on VS2012, you need to use the same compiler.
I'm porting a User Material Routine from Abaqus to ANSYS. I have VS2017 already installed but then read on a few pages that VS2012 is recommended & was curious if this is crucial or I could get away with using VS2017.
VS2017 may work, depends on how big difference between VS2012 and VS2017, and also depends on the libraries from Ansys. Since the VS2012 is recommended, I could assume those dependent libraries from Ansys are built with VS2012, using the consistent compiler is always a better choice.
If I were in your position, I would talk to ANSYS support and ensure which version of Visual Studio has passed their QA testing with the version of ANSYS you have available on your specific OS.
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