VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

Filip — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:55:05 GMT

I managed to track down the new link for the Project Converter:

www.emmet-gray.com/.../ProjectConverter.htm

(works great, thanks Emmet!)

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

skeet — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:40:08 GMT

Sorry Katrin, I don't know anything about it :(

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

Katrin — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:16:01 GMT

Hi the links no longer work. Is there another place where I can get the Project Converter?

Thanks!

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

madmac — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:41:40 GMT

Many thanks for this conversion utility - I have untied the noose around my neck and i am not jumping of this table now :¬)

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

skeet — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:58:29 GMT

@Learning: I suggest you ask the author:

home.hot.rr.com/.../AboutMe.htm

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

Learning — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:09:54 GMT

Can some one please explain to me how to use the ProjectConverter?

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

Tom — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:55:05 GMT

For a while I used VS2005 at home and VS2008 at work. Since I often swapped projects between the two so I could work at home, my method was to simply create new controls in the other and copy the source (which never changed). I've since decided to use VS2005 at work to simplify the situation, but I had to port my 2008 projects back to 2005. I figured it was simply a matter of changing a few details, but I didn't know exactly which ones. Your experiment has been a great help. Thanks!

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

graye — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:59:39 GMT

Final versions of the ProjectConverter source code are at home.hot.rr.com/.../Programs

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

lonifasiko — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:51:09 GMT

Installed VS2008 thinking that other team members running VS2005 would not run into many problems when opening my solutions created with from VS2008. I'm afraid yes, definitively there are big problems...until I discovered ProjectConverter utility from graye.

Thanks graye for developing such a useful tool!

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

Marc Gravell — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:01:34 GMT

For info - note that web-application-projects may have some issues, due to the extra import:

The 8.0 is important; VS2008 will detect this (even if other project changes applied) and the upgrade wizard will whack to 9.0; but this will then fail on VS2005-only machines.

Copying the .targets file and letting 2005 open it with the 9.0 raises a security prompt (once-per-project).

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

graye — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:09:44 GMT

Updated version of Project Converter has been posted. Now includes a C# version of the source code

home.hot.rr.com/.../ProjectConverter.zip

home.hot.rr.com/.../ProjectConverter_CS.zip

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

Joe — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:46:24 GMT

Very nice. I used this information to create a knowledgebase wiki for my tech team, should they encounter a VS2008 solution and they haven't installed VS2008 yet. Thanks for the information, it is most helpful.

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

stevfuri — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:14:54 GMT

When I convert a project it says everything goes according to plan but when I Open the new project file in VS2005 I'm told "The selected file is a solution file, but was created by a newer version of this application and cannot be opened."

When I Open it with VS2008 I receive the VS Conversion Wizard which makes me think it was actually converted back to VS2005.

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

graye — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 02:24:06 GMT

I just finished a "project converter" application that will allow you to convert back and forth between VS2005 and VS2008.

It's an "advanced beta", but you're welcome to take a look at the VB.Net 2008 source code.

home.hot.rr.com/.../ProjectConverter.zip

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re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

skeet — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:56:05 GMT

Firstly, the features of the ".NET 3.5 framework" are *not* syntactic sugar - and can't be, as syntactic sugar is a *language* feature. It's worth differentiating between the framework and C# as a language.

That said, almost all the features of C# 3 are available targeting .NET 2.0, with the following caveats:

1) Without the expression tree support in the framework, the compiler can't output expression tree creation code.

2) Using query expressions requires support of whatever you're trying to call them on, or extension methods - but basically you need whichever Select, Where etc methods you're going to call. I believe there's an open source LINQ to Objects provider being written to target .NET 2.0, but I haven't looked at it.

3) Extension methods require an attribute which you can declare yourself, but it's a bit of a hack.

The point of this original post, however, was to *prevent* the unintentional use of C# 3 features when it would screw up other developers having to compile the same code with a C# 2 compiler.

Stefan, one point I meant to mention before: yes, *some* features can be detected with a regular expression, but I think you'll find it rather harder to work out whether the type inference rules of C# 2 are adequate or whether a particular expression relies on the new rules in C# 3, without basically building a compiler yourself.

Jon

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

Potiguar — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:02:11 GMT

I might be wrong but it seems to be that some of the features of the 3.5 Framework being purely sintatic sugar, we can still compile targeting the 2.0 when using them. In my experience I created a simple class with automatic properties and it also compiles. I guess it's creating a private field on the fly anyway, so it's compilable... same thing with vars, since the compiler will just replace the

var x = 3;

for

int x = 3;

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

skeet — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:21:00 GMT

Stefan,

I have no problem with "var" being supported by default when targeting .NET 2.0, but that's not what my change attempted to achieve. It wasn't changing the target *platform*, it was trying to change the *tools* used for building the solution. As I understand it, setting ToolsVersion to 2.0 should mean that the 2.0 compiler is used, forcing only 2.0 features to be used. That didn't work on my box, despite the experiences of others.

Saying 'The only way to force "C#2.0" language features is to simply not use them' is both unsatisfactory and incorrect.

Unsatisfactory: relying on people just getting it right when it should be easy to automate is always unsatisfactory. All we need is to use the C# 2 compiler when building.

Incorrect: As I've shown, using the LangVersion element forces the compiler to acknowledge C# 3 features - the pity is that it's not supported under VS2005.

The "mixed IDE" development is likely to be common for a while, and it's a shame that it doesn't work *quite* as well as it should do. Allowing VS2005 developers to build C# 3 code is certainly a step in the right direction (although I haven't looked into how easy that would be to do) but it means that all devs need to learn C# 3 in order to understand their colleagues' code, which isn't ideal.

Jon

re: VS2005 and VS2008 co-existence

[Stefan] — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:31:42 GMT

The reason why "var" is supported tough you've selected "2.0 Platform" is that neither "var" nor Lambda Expressions use new Platform features, only the Compiler and IntelliSense got updated to be a bit "smarter". Your assembly will thus be runnable under the 2.0 Platform.

That behaviour of VS.NET is correct. The only way to force "C#2.0" language features is to simply not use them. If you are using a version control system you could do a RegExp check on checked-in files and warn if developers check in files with \svar\s or .*=>.*.

With a VCS you could also automate the process of keeping the V10 and V9 SLN files in sync, and to check for potential problems in the VCPROJ files ( $(MSBuildToolsPath) ).

By the way: It should be possible to force VS.2005 to compile those 2008 solutions with the new C#3.0 compiler, as long as it is installed. It should work the same way as back when it was needed to force 2003 to compile with the VC6 compiler.