Can I use Visual Studio 2010 to edit Visual Studio 2008 solutions without conversion?

Question

I just downloaded a trial version of Visual Studio 2010. It would be nice if I could try this by doing some real work on some real projects, but I cannot convert these projects to the 2010 format, because then nobody could open them if they also did not install VS2010.

Is there any way around this?

Answer 1

You cannot do this unless you make a separate copy of your project . It modifies many files (solution, project, and depending on: perhaps your configs), which is exactly how it is.

The Visual Studio team discusses this fix for the next version , they refer to the concept as a “round trip”, the set of solution / project files supports several versions of visual studio. Seeing that they have not done it yet, though ... this term may change :)

Answer 2

You can use this tool to switch.

Answer 3

The conversion creates a backup. All that really changed is the .sln file, so if you take a copy of the .sln 2008 file. Other users can just use this to open it.

This of course assumes you are sticking to .net3.5

change is bad, it’s wrong.

Answer 4

This may depend on what types of projects you are creating. I tested it working, but then I only did it with 1 solution, which contained WPF and a class library.

I wanted to do something like this, see here in my codeplex project

As I said, I'm not sure if this will work for you, but it was for me.

I worked on this at home and at work (not working just for fun). I had a copy of the 2010 beta at home and 2008 at work.

At first I started working with vs2008, so when I went to open my project, he raised the update wizard.

When I got to work the next day, I accidentally took a hand and created empty solutions, including existing projects in it and saved the solution (calling it something a little different)

So, when I was at work, I was able to run the vs2008 solution file so that some changes updated them to the code and, when I was at home, I could get the latest changes and open them using the 2010 decision file.