Why, oh why do we have to upgrade out Solutions/Projects for VS2010? It’s the references…

The Visual Studio Blog - Why does Visual Studio 2010 convert my projects?

“… One such feature is the conversion process. We have recently received many requests for making the conversion process optional; i.e. supporting the ability to open old Visual Studio version projects in a newer Visual Studio version without the need to convert. We call this round-tripping. This blog post is an attempt to capture the questions that have been asked and our answers to them.

What is round-tripping?

Round-tripping is the ability to use a current or previous version of Visual Studio to target a platform that is supported by both versions of VS. For example, with round-tripping, you can open projects from a previous version of VS in a newer IDE without the need for conversion, thus allowing you to work side-by-side on old and upgraded projects.

Why is round-tripping not supported in VS2010?

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I don’t see a lot of difference between my project files. I can hand-edit it back to work with VS2008. Why can’t VS do this for me?

The solution and project files may not have changed significantly but the files that they reference have changed. For instance, if you have designer files in your project, even if you hand-edit the project and solution files to work with an older VS, the designer files will not work. …

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Given all the news this week, I wanted to make sure I didn’t loose this. This will come to the fore in next month with the RTM of VS2010. I know I’ll get asked about this, so…

We’ve played this game with VS2008’s release and in the end I found it a minor and short term pain. To mitigate it, pick a VS2010 upgrade day and have everyone install it, including on all the build machines and then upgrade your Projects/Solutions. You DON’T have to migrate your Projects to .Net 4. VS Multi-targeting works great. Leave your projects on .Net 2/3/3.5. JUST upgrade your Solutions/Projects to VS2010. In a few hours (or less) you should be in VS2010 bliss…