Using VS2010 to work on project created and maintained with VS2008

Question

I recently started at a new position where the project is being developed using Visual Studio 2008. They would eventually like to move to VS2010, but for the time being all of the developers have and are using VS2008. The project is developed in ASP.NET but also makes use of a lot of classic ASP 3.0 legacy code.

I have been using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate for a while and all my development virtual machines are already setup using VS2010. I would like to avoid having to setup another VM as it takes so long to re-install SQL Server, IIS, and configure everything all over again. It was for this reason I started using virtual machines so I could start right from a base development install that was already configured. I just did not anticipate that I might be working on projects where others were using VS2008.

For this reason I was wondering how well VS2010 worked with projects (web) developed and maintained in VS2008. Can VS2010 work with a VS2008 without modifying the project or solution files? Has anyone had any experience doing this? Thanks a bunch.

P.S. I could always uninstall VS2010 and the install VS2008 but I just assumed this could cause more problems in the end.

Answer 1

Opening a project in VS2010 will update the project file. This will mean that VS2008 won't be able to open the project again.

You could create a copy of the project file and update that, but you would then have to maintain two project files - making sure you added files to both.

Answer 2

Why do your Virtual Machines require an IDE in the first place?

Create a "VS2K10" Solution with matching "VS2K10" Projects and include all of the files from the 2K8 Solution and Projects, which should work fine. You will have to keep the files in the 2K8 Solution synced with your 2K10 Solution manually since they won't be aware of added and deleted files.

Answer 3

In my experience, you have to update the project files from VS2008 to VS2010 and there is no reverse path. However, that does not mean you can't work on the projects with that mechanism. Just be sure not to check in the project files into your source server.

Answer 4

Why not install both Visual Studio 2010 and 2008? They use their own compiler set and their Windows SDK paths can be set up independently as far as I know. You'll need to install that on all your VMs, but I don't see a reason to uninstall VS2010....