Very blunt and to the point, but does anyone know how to convert a visual studio 2008 project to visual studio 2003, I'm meant to be delivering some stuff to a client and they only work in 2003.
Sorry someone makes a very good point, what language, C# is the answer.
I've done a bunch of searches on Google and tend to only come up with 2003->2008 and not visa versa, I would very much appreciate any help.
It cannot be done in the general case, as the VS2008 project may use .NET 3.5 features that don't exist in .NET 1.1 used in VS2003.
If you only have .NET 1.1 features in your VS2008 project, you could conceivably just copy the files, create a VS2003 project, then use "Add Existing Item" to get those items into the VS2003 project.
2008 has more settings than 2003. So if the project has some special settings your screwed.
Else create a new 2003 project and copy all the source files? (and use the same configuration)
It is going to be very difficult because VS2003 projects use .NET 1.1 and VS2008 use .NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 (depending on the configuration of the project). The problem will be that there are features that have been to each version of the framework, and it is likely the code will use features that do not exist in .NET 1.1
There were converters to go from the old VS2003 project format to the MSBuild format used by 2005/2008, but I don't think any exist to go backward. Keep in mind that any non-trivial project in VS2008 might be challenging to move to VS2003 -- especially for an automated tool. For example, WinForms went through massive changes between VS2003 and VS2005.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Visual Studio 2003 only support .net 1.1? That means that if you have a .net 2.0 or 3.5 Application you have a problem. For C++ I guess it's a similar issue due to the old compiler.
Means: I believe it's borderline-impossible.
Related
The development team I am joining all use VS 2010 Pro, possibly with TFS or some other SVN system. I placed an order to have it installed but our procurement process screwed up and it seems they have ordered 2012...
Are there any compatibility issues? It seems it will work with TFS 2010 but I remember going from 2008-2010 a lot of programs just broke plus they have to upgrade the project.
There's a lot that's improved from the VS2008 -> VS2010 scenario, and a bit that hasn't (or has gotten worse).
Project Compatibility
In most cases, VS2012 will be able to open a VS2010 project without making incompatible changes. The main caveat to this is that the VS2010 user needs to have SP1 installed.
Some project types from VS2010 are no longer supported in VS2012. The top ones I can think of are Setup projects or Database projects. In VS2012, these projects simply won't open (but if you don't need to build them, possibly no harm done).
See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/03/28/round-tripping-with-visual-studio-11.aspx for more on this.
TFS compatibility
VS2012 should be compatible with TFS 2010, but any new functionality in VS2012 won't be available (which is logical since the server doesn't support it). For more, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997788.aspx#compat.
Runtime compatibility
VS2012 installs .NET 4.5 (also shipped in-box with Windows 8), which is an in-place upgrade of .NET 4.0 - it replaces all of the binaries, as opposed being a side-by-side releases like 3.0 and 3.5 were to 2.0.
There are a few runtime differences that you might encounter in .NET 4.5. Some of these may be bugs in 4.5 which may be fixed in a future hotfix, and some may be intentional changes (i.e. bugs from 4.0 fixed in 4.5). The point here being, if you do run into one of these issues, your fellow developers might not encounter the same issue. Then again, if you're planning to support Windows 8, that could be a good thing.
(I don't have a list of known incompatibilities between 4.0 and 4.5... if someone does, please feel free to edit).
It depends on what features you use in Visual Studio. In our company, we have not considered an upgrade yet due to 2012 not supporting installer projects (*.vdp) - you now have to use WiX, InstallShield, or some other installer.
There are compat patches on top of VS2010SP1 specifically addressing some minor pain points for this scenario. You can find those on msdn. Link http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29082
Other than that things should just work fine as long as you ensure you have the right target framework version and platform toolsets etc for your projects eg. dont target your project to v4.5 since it will not work for your devs using VS2010
I wrote an add-in for Inventor 2012, the add-in must be .NET 3.5 it seems. I have not found an update that enables .NET 4 yet.
The rest of my codebase is .NET 4.0 and hence I cannot reference my other projects from my add-in code. Is there a workaround for this?
No. You could spawn a separate process and talk to it, but other than that, outta luck.
It looks like Inventor 2013 is compiled for .Net 4. That is not a patch I can easily apply at the moment.
My project leader insists on using Visual Studio 2005 which only targets the .NET 2.0 framework and only supports C# 2.0 syntax.
He insists that the 2.0 framework has higher compatiblity and performance for older computers. By old, I mean 5-8 year old Windows XP machines.
Assuming we only support a minimum of Windows XP / Server 2003, is there any advantage at all to using .NET 2.0?
I am pretty sure that even targeting .NET 2.0 we can take advantage of C# 3.0 syntax in our code (lambdas, auto-implemented properties, etc.) if we upgrade past VS2005.
.Net 2.0 is considered to be more widely deployed, but 3.5 isn't far behind any more. However, that's no reason to limit yourself to Visual Studio 2005 or C# 2.0. Visual Studio 2010 can target .Net 2.0, and use C# 3.0 features when it does so to boot.
.NET 2 is no longer supported by Microsoft. Well, Microsoft makes the terms tougher to explain. For Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, you have to at least use .NET Framework 3.5 SP1,
http://blogs.technet.com/b/lifecycle/archive/2010/04/30/net-framework-3-5-sp1-and-later-now-supported-as-part-of-microsoft-windows.aspx
so that you can receive assistance from Microsoft support team.
Therefore, I see no reason to stay on .NET 2.
"the 2.0 framework has higher compatiblity and performance for older computers" is a joke for me. When you lose support-ability from Microsoft, you lose everything.
Normally, people who would like to use the older version is mainly because they think the old one is more stable and better to production.
But .NET 2.0 is quite out of date already, and .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 have been proven to be very stable and make things easier. (such as LINQ, you can try functional style programming via it, very fluent and productive)
For the IDE part, Microsoft rebuild the visual studio 2010, it is more stable and productive, and it is also can target .NET2.0 if you want.
So, why not use Visual Studio 2010 instead of 2005, even if your project is purely .NET2.0, the former also has downward compatibility.
I have VS2005 and .net 3.5 installed on my machine I have heard of WPF and want to practice WPF solutions what other software should I install to write WPF program in VS2005 as it does not show any option for the same by default.
Also any link for some cool stuff for beginners on WPF will be very helpful.
Please help
You can get them from here: http://download.cnet.com/The-Visual-Studio-2005-extensions-for-NET-Framework-3-0-WCF-WPF-November-2006-CTP/3000-10250_4-10727672.html.
This was the last version Microsoft released before telling everyone to go with VS2008. If you can't do VS2008, this is an ok solution. We used it for a year and a half and have production UIs running based on it. The problems are that the designer is basically non-existent (so be ready to code XAML by hand), it can be a bit slow, and there's some bugs.
Re: 3.5, VS 2005 is incapable of handling 3.5 projects, linq, etc. If you really want, you can work outside of VS and just use msbuild 3.5. An interesting fact: .Net 3.5 replaces, among some libraries, the PresentationFramework assembly. The new version of this assembly includes additional methods and method signatures that are not included in .Net 3.0. This means that these new 3.5 methods will be accessible in VS2005.
Vinay,
i don't think 2005 can do WPF and it definitely cannot handle .Net 3.5. VS2005 is 2.0.
Start with downloading VS2008 Express. It's free and will have the tools you need to get started with WPF.
http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/
Microsoft had release a extension called "VS 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WPF & WCF)" but it is not longer available and supported and Microsoft recommends that you upgrade to Visual Studio 2008.
I believe you'll need Visual Studio 2008 in order to do WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) development, however, there is a way to do some Silverlight (which is a subset of the "full" WPF technology) using Visual Studio 2005. See here:
Silverlight with Visual Studio .NET 2005
You'll need the .NET Framework 3.0 at least, as well as the Silverlight Developer Runtime
Don't forget, though, that you can effectively get a "free" version of Visual Studio (via the Visual Web Developer Express 2008 version) which, I think, will allow "full" WPF development.
Building the Perfect Developer Workstation for WPF by Tim Sneath should answer your question
I'm currently using VS2005 Profesional and .NET 2.0, and since our project is rather large (25 projects in the solution), I'd like to try VS 2008, since its theoretically faster with larger projects.
Before doing such thing, i'd like to know if what I've read is true: can I use VS2008 in ".net 2.0" mode? I don't want my customers to install .net 3.0 or .3.5, I just want to install VS2008, open my solution and start working from there.
Is this possible?
P.D.: the solution is a c# Window Forms project.
Yes it's possible. In the project properties you can target different versions of the .Net Framework going back to .NET 2.0.
Upgrading to VS 2008 will upgrade your Solution file and you won't be able to go back to VS 2005 unless you have backed up your solution
yes, vs2008 can "target" a framework, but i think by default, if converting from vs2005 - vs2008 it just keeps it at framework 2.0
It is possible to have a 2.0 project in VS 2008. You would just target .NET Framework 2.0 under the project properties.
Your solution will have to be converted to a VS9 solution however.
Yes you can run 2.0 with VS2008. Be sure to select that when you convert, however. When converting a project, I mistakenly left in the ASP.NET 3.5 conversion, and then all new files contained references to Linq, so it was a little bit of a pain to switch back to 2.0 when I realized the mistake.
Yes, the feature that enables this is Visual Studio 2008 is called multi-targeting. See this link for more information. To use it you simply open the Properties for your Project, and select the Target Framework you want from the drop-down list on that page.
And bear in mind that all this stuff about the projects being compatible between 2005 and 2008 is NOT true for C/C++ projects.
I had absolutely no problems switching to VS2008. :) Multi-targeting worked without a hitch.