Visual Studio 2005 Compatibility Mode? | Tech Off

cravikiran
Ravi Chodavarapu

I may be missing something obvious but I just started with the VS 2005 Beta 2 and was wondering if there's some way to run it in a compatibilty mode of sorts for framework version 1.1? For example, when adding references, I want to be able to select the 1.1 version of System.Web, etc. Also, the generated assembly should run completely on framework 1.1. I need this especially for Windows Forms. While the new controls are awesome, I want to have a 1.1 runtime application at this time. May seem counter-intuitive but I want one tool (with all the extra 2005 features of course) which can be used for both 1.1 and 2.0 apps. Any way to do this?

Sampy
This will be the sixth time we have destroyed it and we have become exceedingly efficient at it

Unfortunatly, no.

Visual Studio 2002, 2003, and 2005 only build applications for the runtime that they shipped with. Windows Forms would be the hardest to point backwards since it now usese partial classes in the code it generates.

We realize this is kinda lame and are going to try to make things better in future versions.

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

Sampy with the official answer, C9 with the hackish workarounds. Smiley

Check out this blog post about building 1.1 apps with Whidbey.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

You could author a VS2005 modular component that adds back 1.1 support by "re-adding" C#, VB, J#, and MC++ 1.1 with the settings to use the 1.1 compilers.

Of course, it would be a right PITA.

sbc
GW R/Me

Sampy wrote:
Unfortunatly, no.

Visual Studio 2002, 2003, and 2005 only build applications for the runtime that they shipped with. Windows Forms would be the hardest to point backwards since it now usese partial classes in the code it generates.

We realize this is kinda lame and are going to try to make things better in future versions.

Makes it difficult when you have to have a specific version of Visual Studio depending on which version of the framework you use. No different from VB though I suppose.

What is good about some open source languages (PHP, Perl etc) is that updates are done incrementally (4.1 4.2 4.3 etc), however that could make it harder to develop for as you will have to know what version your web host uses and not to use functions that are not part of that version (as your development machine may be a later version)..

The perfect Visual Studio would be one that could target all .NET versions, and give an error if a class uses features not available in the targetted version (or perhaps disable features depending on what version the project is targetted at, like Word does when you choose an old Word format). SharpDevelop can target different version (Mono, .NET 1.0, .NET 1.1). So if GPL'd software can do this, why can't Visual Studio? You can also target with NAnt and MSBuild.

Sampy
This will be the sixth time we have destroyed it and we have become exceedingly efficient at it

We can't do this because of some architectural choices that we made early in the design of VS. SharpDevelop decided that they would let you target multiple frameworks and they designed for that in mind. There are advantages to knowing that you'll only ever target one framework. You can get yourself in to trouble loading designers and tools that use base types from one version of the framework but need to target another. The problems aren't insurmountable, they just weren't the problems we decided to tackle this version.

A lot of us realize this is lame and are going to work to make VS better in this regard in the future. We'll never have a perfect Visual Studio but we'll have a better one Smiley