Is it possible to develop ".NET framework 4.0" [beta] apps with Visual Studio 2008?

Question

Is it possible to develop .net 4.0 [beta] apps with Visual Studio 2008?

I tried Visual Studio 2010 few days after ms released it, and managed to crash it few times in one hour :( and wouldn't use it anymore if it's not more stable now => have MS released any bugfixes?

Answer 1

I tried myself and it didn't work. There was a conflict with the new version of old libraries (ie. System.Core).

Answer 2

You haven't said which version you tried. Visual Studio 2010 hasn't been "released" as a product - there's been a CTP and a beta. There haven't been any bugfixes to beta 1 as far as I'm aware.

I suspect that with a lot of effort you could develop against .NET 4.0 with Visual Studio 2008, but you wouldn't get any of the new language features, and you'd probably see some weird behaviour from things like Intellisense. Basically you'd have to hand-craft a build file to ignore the standard libraries that VS2008 knows about and refer to the .NET 4.0 ones instead. I think it would be a pretty painful experience.

I've found VS2010 beta 1 to be reasonably stable - certainly stable enough for experimentation. It's a bit slow (which Microsoft is working on) but it's mostly okay.

As Brian says, if you install just the beta of .NET 4.0 you can use csc etc directly. I do that a fair amount. Bear in mind that the framework and compiler are in beta as well - I've found and reported a few bugs, for example. You should also expect some of the features and behaviour to change before the final version is released.

Answer 3

You need both the compiler and the new runtime + framework which are not available through VS2008 AFAIK.

You could however skip VS entirely and just use the command line compiler if you feel VS2010 is too shaky at the moment.