After being informed of VS2008 multi-targeting capabilities, I went to download and install Beta 2. The install was quite easy and allot faster then VS 2005. I had to reboot once after installing the framework 3.5, and then once after the install was completed.
My first 2 issues that I encountered were, no support for rptproj files, and it wanted to do an upgrade on the solution and project files. For the upgrade, if it just updates the solution, I’m not that concerned, as we don’t keep solutions in source control. However, if the project files are updated, then that is a problem, and will prevent me from using Beta2 until the entire team is ready to upgrade.
To test, I copied a project to a separate folder and ran an inplace upgrade. Since I don’t have TFS client installed (issue #3, need to either install the 2005 TFS client or download and install the TFS Beta 2 client, or rather the entire ISO), I had to remove the source control bindings (good for this test). The project file converted successfully with no errors. I opened up VS2005 and selected the project, and was prompted with a warning about invalid tags in the csporj file, and I could either open for browsing, or open normally. I chose to open normally, and it did successfully. There was a hint that installing a registry key will allow you to specify to ignore the new tag that VS2008 inserts. I think that this will be a suitable work around. Next step is to try upgrading on the live projects, rebuild and make sure everything works. Then create a registry file that the team users can execute.
Upon closer examination of the converted csproj file, it replaces an Import statement, with a new one.
Old:
<Import Project=”$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets” />
New:
<Import Project=”$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets” Condition=”" />
I added the old line manually to the converted csproj file, and it still built. However on a machine that doesn’t have Vs2008 installed, that new import path doesn’t exist, and the project can not load.
Doing some more searching has yielded no suitable work around except coping the new build targets to each workstation. This seems to work.
One other upgrade issue is VS2008 will replace what version of the UnitTesting assembly you use (8 to 9). Changing the reference to use specific version to false seems to be a suitable workaround. I just need to remember to set it back to true once everyone else is up and running.