Can I safely Install Visual Studio 2010 AFTER Visual Studio 2012? - visual-studio-2010

I know traditionally its best to install programs in the order they were 'born' as that's generally going to avoid more problems.
Are there any known chronological dependencies between these two programs?

It works on my machine.
I just did it a day or so ago and had no problems. I was surprised at how smoothly it went, so if that's any indication of the usual, it should be a breeze.
Visual Studio is pretty good about installing to a particular directory, with the exception of support components (which are detected as already-installed and skipped). When installing 10 after 11, only 10 itself and a runtime or two were needed. Both 10 and 11 have been working perfectly since, including 11's support for compiling projects as 10 (to support XP, which was why I installed both).
It does get a little bit messier with installing 9 (2008), but you can typically install that after 10 and use the back-compiling. I have no idea what happens if you install 11, then 10, then 9 (it could work).

VS 2012 broke 2010 for me, but I don't know if it would break the other way. Certainly, don't do it on your production environment.
Workaround : freely downloadable Windows SDK has the vc10 compilers and toolchain, and you can use it when compiling from VS2012. Just select appriopriate platform toolset in project options.

Related

Windows-SDK vs. Visual-Studio compatibility

Is there any compatibility matrix as to what Visual Studio Versions (Say, ranging 2005 - 2017) are compatible with which Windows SDK Versions?
Should any Windows SDK be fully compatible with "any" C++ compiler, or are the different Windows SDK versions bound to certain compiler versions?
For example(!), we have a legacy C++ application that is still compiled with VS2005. We found that we'd like to use GetDpiForMonitor from this application. But to use this function, would require to use the headers+libs from at least an SDK supporting Windows 8.1 (e.g. the 8.1 SDK headers at C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\Include\um)
Generally, should a developer expect to be able to switch to a newer Windows SDK version without upgrading his compiler / Visual Studio?
Please refrain from suggesting to upgrade VS: This question tries to establish what you should do when upgrading VS is not an option for now, but you want to use stuff from (and depend on) functionality only available in newer Windows (SDK) versions.
concerning the "compatibility matrix": I don't think anybody made the effort to up to create one, also I'm not sure if this is really needed.
Rule of thumb: those API headers don't change quite often, and when they do, they are usually pretty much backward compatible.
The tricky part may be to teach your older VS to get along with a new SDK, you may need to change the VC+ include/source/lib directories for your solution/project manually.
(if it complies & links in your old VS, you should be fine)

The C# project is targeting ".NeETFramework, Version=v4.0", which is not installed on this machine

Trying to run an old project in Visual Studio 2015. It was created in 2012 or 2013, I cannot remember which. I have uninstalled both programs as I was running out of space, and i think that is what caused this. I get the following options:
And I do not want to change the target, so clicking on the second option brings me to https://www.microsoft.com/net/targeting which I can't seem to find anything there that remedies the situation. Is there a way around this without reinstalling the old version of Visual Studio again? Will that even fix my problem? Thank you.
Just Reinstall Visual Studio. When you uninstalled previous version it caused this problem.
You could try doing a repair reinstall of Visual Studio 2015.
Another point to consider is that Windows 7 (the oldest version of Windows still supported by Microsoft) includes a Windows Update for the .NET Framework v4.6.1 categorized as an "Important" update. I have not confirmed with Windows 8, but I suspect it, too, includes a similar update. Windows 10 comes with .NET 4.6 to start with. That means that any up-to-date supported machine today will be able to run apps targeting any .NET version up to and including 4.6. I recognize that there may be other reasons to continue targeting an older .NET version, but I bring this up just in case the concern is support on client workstations.

Visual Studio v2003, v2005, v2008 and v2010 existing on the same system

I currently have Visual Studio v2003, v2005, v2008 installed on my system. Things work fine...no issues.
I now have to install Visual Studio 2010 on my system and just wanted to know if anyone has a setup like mine or knows if there are any potential issues with so many versions existing on a system.
Really don't have a choice to remove older versions as we have a lot of legacy products written in these old versions and we are not upgrading them to new versions, only doing bug fixes on them.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
VS2010 supports targeting on multiple versions of .NET Framework (i.e. 2.0 or later), which mean it is designed to support the projects that were built with VS2005/VS2008 so-called backward-compatibility.
So I think no conflict here between these versions,
I've found a nice Myths and facts about VS 2005/2008/2010, check out this link here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/ee679805.aspx
It should work.
I have vs2003, vs2008 and vs2010 installed and I see no issue (but vs2010 is not yet used for production code).
M.
All these versions of Visual Studio are independent.
You should have no problem (other than lack of disk space!) installing VS2010 as well.
Just make sure you install the service pack as well.
They cohabitate fine, I have a similar setup myself.
You should at least push for migrating away from 2003 and 2005 though, they use some pretty old technology, and pretty much everyone these days has .net 3.5 on their systems.
If you are able to use VS 2010 I would highly recommend you do for all new projects - even if you have to target an earlier version of .NET framework.
Keep the old versions of VS installed only for maintenance of projects that cannot be migrated to VS 2010 version.
By the way, the migration to VS 2010 is often very trivial and well worth an hour or two of effort!

Do all the members of my development team have to upgrade to Studio 2010 SP1 simultaneously?

We have 7 developers, plus a build machine or two, all currently running VS2010 RTM. We want to upgrade to SP1, but we'd prefer not to have to all go at once - a simple scheduling concern.
Can we have two people working simultaneously on a single .sln with some of them on RTM and some on SP1?
Yes you can - we have a mix of devs in the same team (working on the same projects/solutions), some with SP1, some without, and no-one has reported any issues yet.
I also don't recall seeing any warning from the usual Microsoft suspects (Scott Guthrie, Scot Hanselmann, etc) saying that you couldn't run the same solution across both versions of VS, so you should be good to upgrade at the speed you want.

Install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 beside VS2008

I am too paranoid to install VS2010 Beta 2 on my production machine beside VS2008 without hearing from people who have already took the plunge. I know MS says it's OK, but that does not necessarily mean it will work.
Has anyone successfully installed VS2010 Beta 2 (preferably Ultimate edition) on their production machine with no negative consequences?
If you're that paranoid (and perhaps reasonably so!), have you thought of running it up in a virtual machine ? You can then point it to the same source repository, and be confident that the two won't interfere.
I have installed VS2010 beta 2 in my machine, together with VS2008, and it seems to work fine. There were two compelling reasons for me to start using it right now, both related to Silverlight: unit testing and visual designer.
Take a look at some of the list of known issues in VS 2010 beta 2.
I have installed it to a machine with VS 2008 on it that I don't care about. :)
Looking at the "correct" uninstall procedure from that link above makes me think that not putting it on a production box is a good idea... Going from that beta to the next one is going to be a PITA.
And whoever said they are WPF/Winform it won't conflict is crazy. .Net 4 installs side by side, yes. But there are policy files and binding redirects installed for all editions on your box because VS 2010 can also build / debug / test .Net 2/3/3.5 assemblies. You are touching every .Net runtime on your box when you install VS 2010 (like it or not).
It's working for me; I haven't seen any problems so far (admittedly in, like, one day).
That said, I'd be a lot more cautious if we didn't have a separate build server for our production builds.
Since it's in Beta, I would not install it on a production box; not even in your daily development machine. The best solution is a virtual machine, which is the way I always try beta software.
VS2010 beta 1 worked perfectly alongside VS2005 and VS2008 on two PCs for me. (One XP, one Vista)
It also uninstalled cleanly in both cases.
This is no guarantee of Beta2 working perfectly of course, but you should be ok. Generally the advice is: don't install Beta visual studio releases on development machines - use a virtual PC or a PC you don't mind reinstalling the OS on.
I have a parallel install of VS 2008 and VS 2010 beta 2. The only negative consequence is that some Microsoft DLLS (Microsoft.Test...) that is part of the unittest framework on both vs2008 and vs2010 needs to be referenced by version in the vs.net 2008 projects. Otherwise vs2008 may just pick the vs2010 reference by default and you get compilation errors.

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