Do I need Visual Studio 2005 installed if I have Visual Studio 2008?

Question

I'm the only developer at my company. All new development I do is in .NET 3.5 but I maintain a bunch of .NET 2.0 programs. I can create and edit .NET 2.0 solutions in Visual Studio 2008, so I'm wondering if there is any reason I shouldn't uninstall Visual Studio 2005 from my machine.

Thanks

Answer 1

You don't need it as long as you upgrade your 2005 project files to 2008. 2008 can target either the 2.0 or 3.5 frameworks as you mentioned.

Answer 2

Unless you need to track down vs2005 specific bugs in installed code then vs2008 is an improvement ( and can target .net 2.0)

Answer 3

uninstall away... we have migrated all of our 2005 solutions to 2008.

You'll also be able to start using the features of .NET 3.5 as long as it is supported where ever your applications are hosted/run from

Answer 4

The only reason that you might need VS2005 is if you're working with other people who don't have VS2008.

However, since it's already installed, there's no specific reason to remove it unless you're low on disk space. In addition, removing it may break some things by uninstalling their dependencies (I don't know of any specific examples), so I wouldn't recommend it.

Answer 5

There are reasons to keep VS 05 and 08 installed on a single machine:

• If you have to support customers with VS '05 projects
• If you have tools (like Platform Builder) that Microsoft hasn't yet seen fit to integrate with VS '08 (thanks Microsoft, way to be on the ball)
• If you need to support any FFx/CF 1.0 project (for example if you have customers using WinCE 4.1 devices)

It's likely that you, and most everyone reading this, can get away with having only '08 installed, but not everyone gets that luxury. Maybe with the release of VS10 I'll be able to remove something.

Also, be forewarned that if you do device development, do not uninstall VS '05 if VS '08 is installed. If it's there leave it, even if you never use it. Uninstalling will break device connectivity from VS '08 and will require a full reinstall of VS '08.