CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#visual-studio
allanx2000
allanx2000

Reputation: 694

VS 2012 Compatibility with 2010

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.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 640

Answers (3)

allen
allen

Reputation: 4647

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

Upvotes: -1

Jimmy
Jimmy

Reputation: 28386

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).

Upvotes: 4

Pedro
Pedro

Reputation: 12328

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.

Upvotes: 0

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