Monday, April 25, 2011

Converting Visual Studio 2008 project to 2003

Very blunt and to the point, but does anyone know how to convert a visual studio 2008 project to visual studio 2003, I'm meant to be delivering some stuff to a client and they only work in 2003.

Sorry someone makes a very good point, what language, C# is the answer.

I've done a bunch of searches on Google and tend to only come up with 2003->2008 and not visa versa, I would very much appreciate any help.

From stackoverflow
  • 2008 has more settings than 2003. So if the project has some special settings your screwed. Else create a new 2003 project and copy all the source files? (and use the same configuration)

  • It cannot be done in the general case, as the VS2008 project may use .NET 3.5 features that don't exist in .NET 1.1 used in VS2003.

    If you only have .NET 1.1 features in your VS2008 project, you could conceivably just copy the files, create a VS2003 project, then use "Add Existing Item" to get those items into the VS2003 project.

    phsr : Don't forget you could set the target framework to 2.0 or 3.0 in VS2008
    John Saunders : Yes, but not .NET 1.1.
  • It is going to be very difficult because VS2003 projects use .NET 1.1 and VS2008 use .NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 (depending on the configuration of the project). The problem will be that there are features that have been to each version of the framework, and it is likely the code will use features that do not exist in .NET 1.1

  • There were converters to go from the old VS2003 project format to the MSBuild format used by 2005/2008, but I don't think any exist to go backward. Keep in mind that any non-trivial project in VS2008 might be challenging to move to VS2003 -- especially for an automated tool. For example, WinForms went through massive changes between VS2003 and VS2005.

  • Please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Visual Studio 2003 only support .net 1.1? That means that if you have a .net 2.0 or 3.5 Application you have a problem. For C++ I guess it's a similar issue due to the old compiler.

    Means: I believe it's borderline-impossible.

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