I have a VS 2010 solution with 17 projects in it. I want to make a dependency diagram which shows dependencies between the projects.
Have a look at my latest program at http://devio.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/visual-studio-solution-dependency-visualizer/
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Is there any way that I can use the latest IDE (VS2015) to work with my old solution project but i don't wish to upgrade my project?
Unfortunately, you cannot do this. The format of project and solution files was changed in VS 2010, so the furthest back you could possibly go with VS 2015 would be to VS 2010.* And that wouldn't help you any for cross-compatibility, since VS 2008 can't open VS 2010 project files.
You have no real choice but to allow the IDE to convert your solution and project files to the latest version. However, this will not delete your old VS 2008 project/solution files. They will still be in the solution directory, and will still work for opening the solution in VS 2008. The new project/solution files will open the solution in VS 2015.
This was a very common strategy employed by open-source projects before recent versions of Visual Studio implemented cross-compatibility. They would just have multiple versions of project and solution files for each supported version of Visual Studio.
The only disadvantage with this is that changes you make to one version of a project or solution file don't propagate to the others automatically. But this isn't really that big of a deal, since once a project is reasonably mature, the project and solution files don't change very often.
* In fact, VS 2015 interoperates smoothly with project/solution files from VS 2013, VS 2012, and VS 2010 SP1. It can create and modify project files for any of these versions. See MSDN: Porting, Migrating, and Upgrading Visual Studio Projects (for Visual Studio 2015)
We can create Class Diagram in Microsoft Visual Studio which shows relation between classes.
Is it possible to create/draw/export Project Dependencies Diagram? Something that shows dependencies between projects in a diagram, not only a list.
Is there any extension for Visual Studio to do so?
If you have Visual Studio Ultimate, you can use the Architecture Menu -> Generate Dependency Graph.
I don't know if it's available in downlevel skus.
Now that Visual Studio 2015 RC is out, has anyone installed it and opened Visual Studio 2013 projects/solutions?
Does it ask the files to be changed?
If yes, are the changes it makes backward compatible?
Take a look at the Porting, Migrating, and Upgrading Visual Studio Projects article for Visual Studio 2015. All of the various caveats are described there.
Not all types of project are supported. I tried the following 4 project types:
Vb.net Class project, OK.
Vb.net Web Services project, OK.
Cordova JS project, not OK, need to migrate manually, by moving the sources from root directory to the www directory and install all API again.
C#.net winform project, OK.
Yes, though you sometimes will have to change the version (single number) in .sln file, no other differences found yet.
We resolved this by typically excluding this file from check in and only check it in when there really was a change (added project, ...) - and then to fix the version before checking in. (Different developer machines with different versions of VS.)
See question Visual Studio 2015 solutions backwards compatibility with Visual Studio 2013 and answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/31540590/586754.
(Assuming you are having basic projects that are supported by both versions, like C# and .net framework that is supported by lower version VS.)
I have a solution file Blah.sln in Visual Studio that contains say 10 projects. On a commit only 1-2 projects would be changed so doing an incremental build on the solution file would only build those projects.
What I would like to do though, whenever I do an incremental build in Visual Studio, I would like to know which projects were built and which projects were not touched. Does Visual Studio has any feature support for this?
Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Is it possible to build a Debugging Visualizer that can be used in multiple versions of Visual Studio?
A Debugging Visualizer has to reference Microsoft.VisualStudio.DebuggerVisualizers.dll and there is a separate version of the assembly for every version of Visual Studio. It seems that these versions are not compatible. For example, if I built a visualizer that references Microsoft.VisualStudio.DebuggerVisualizers v9.0, it can be used in Visual Studio 2008, but not in Visual Studio 2010.
I am looking for a way to target at least Visual studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 while maintaining only one project for the visualizer. Duplicating the project and changing only references to Microsoft.VisualStudio.DebuggerVisualizers will work, but it creates a maintenance horror.
If your code base is exactly the same for both referenced assemblies then I would suggest the same approach as I've suggested in this question: Visual Studio Installer -- Change application resource
The idea is to have 1 project where you will have a MSBuild property which VS to target and depending on this property you may reference either VS 2008 or VS 2010 DebuggerVisualizers assembly.
The only other solution I see is the one you've mentioned - having 2 separate project files to target different VS version. I do not think it will be that difficult to maintain two versions if you will not duplicate code. And you can avoid duplicating code by including code files as links into your projects.