Getting rid of Visual Studio 2005 - And a Poll

By

At work, our .NET development group more or less unanimously made the decision that now that Visual Studio 2008 is RTM, it is time to think about getting everything we do upgraded to the point where we simply don't need Visual Studio 2005 any longer.

The only real issue we could find is that Compact Framework 2003 projects are no longer supported. Since we don't happen to have any, that takes care of that, doesn't it?

So we decided that any existing projects would be migrated upwards to Visual Studio 2008. Everything in Team System is getting upgraded; if it doesn't support Visual Studio 2008, we'll let VS 2008 convert it and check all the revised stuff back in.

Since 2008 solutions / projects can be set to target specific runtimes you will find that this is pretty much a no-brainer. If your stuff is .NET Framework 2.0 compliant, all you need to do is ensure that the target Framework is set and you can check your stuff in with a Visual Studio 2008 Solution file and all the project files and class files should be fine. As a "failsafe", you could always first make a copy of the VS2005 .sln file and rename it to include "2005", and check that in as well.


The Next Step

Once this is all done, the next step is to get rid of Visual Studio 2005 on your machine - along with all related installations. This isn't rocket science -- you just need to go into Control Panel / Programs And Features, and uninstall anything with "2005" in the name. Here is a sample list you can use as a guide:

  • Team Suite

  • SDK

  • Toolbox Controls Installer

  • Project Aggregator 2

  • Visual J# 2.0 Redistributable Package

  • MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2005

  • --anything with an Install Date prior to what you installed with Visual Studio 2008

Once this is done, you will most likely find that anytime you click on a .sln file that Visual Studio 2008 will come up with the "Welcome to Visual Studio .NET Conversion Wizard" wizard UI and you can convert your solution or project with no problems. You will see a dialog referring to the Framework version:

This is asking if you want to have your project upgraded to reference the .NET Framework 3.5. If you do not have 3.5 specific code in the project, it is best to chooose "No". This will make it easier if you ever have to downgrade a solution file to Visual Studio 2005. Otherwise, I have yet to see a solution / project that fails to convert and build properly.


The Bottom Line

Visual Studio 2008 is here; there is rarely a reason to keep Visual Studio 2005 around any longer. Free up the disk space and get with the program! There is only one issue and a commenter mentioned it: no direct support for classic ASP debugging any longer. Gregg Miskelly's blog explains:

http://blogs.msdn.com/greggm/archive/2006/03/15/552108.aspx

As a last note, don't look for Visual J# in Visual Studio 2008. It's gone. History, man!

Oh, and take the poll just below!



Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Unknown10:55 PM

    For those poor souls (like me) that still maintain classic asp applications, you won't want to ditch VS2005 just yet. VS2008 dumps classic asp debugging, syntax highlighting and intellisense.

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg4:50 PM

    Gregg M from the Visual Studio team explains how you can still debug classic ASP

    He also details why Visual Studio 2008 no longer directly supports it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown7:49 PM

    @Peter
    Gregg's article details how to get VS2005 working to debug classic ASP (I actually meant to link to that post myself). However, my point is still valid. The macro on Gregg's page will still work (with some minor edits) -- BUT (and this is a big BUT) -- unlike VS2005, there is NO WAY to get intellisense and syntax highlighting in VS2008 for classic ASP (or VBS).

    Also, you can't easily use the macro in VS2008 because VS2008 will not let you set a break-point in a classic ASP file. The only workaround is to EDIT the script to add a "stop" command where you want the script to break. So.. I stand by my statement that classic ASP developers will not want to ditch VS2005 yet.

    Regards,
    Glen

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous4:24 PM

    While I don't know of a way to get the syntax highlighting and intellisense, you can still place breakpoints in classic asp pages.

    You can create a new extension called .debug in the Application Mappings in the virtual directory properties (mapped to asp.dll). Then after attaching to the asp worker process, it allows you to place breakpoints as usual.

    --Zach

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous6:23 AM

    Well, Switch to VS2008. But only if you have the time to test the results for all projects you've converted. And to fix possible errors. Only then you can be sure the errors were caused by the switch to VS2008, and that is was not some other 'surrounding factor' like a switch to IIS 7 you plan after converting VS.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

By
I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b...
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

By
Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

By
One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m...
Read more

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more