Any pitfalls to working on a project created in a 'higher' version of Visual Studio?

Question

I'm asking this specifically regarding Visual Studio 2008 and also the upcoming Visual Studio 2010.

If we are given a project that has been created in an edition of Visual Studio such as Team Suite or Ultimate, and all we have to work with is Professional, would that interfere with us working with the project? I'm assuming the code would all work as it just uses the Framework, but what about features specific to the higher versions? Any IDE issues?

Edit : Our specific scenario is that we're working with a large software company that uses the top versions, and we don't. There's a significant (and growing) amount of code exchange. Given that Professional 2010 with MSDN is $1200, and Ultimate is about 10 times that, we'll have major budget issues if the whole team needs to upgrade. Knowing that the projects will compile is fine, but I'd want to be sure that we couldn't find aspects of their solutions that we weren't actually able to work on.

Answer 1

There shouldn't be any issues with opening projects created in different editions of the same version of Visual Studio.

I haven't tried between Professional and Team Suite for example, but there are no issues with opening projects that created in the Express edition in the Professional edition and vice versa.

There may will be aspects of the project you can't access/use any more, but the project should still recompile and run. To clarify this a bit more, in the case of the Express versions plugins (such as ReSharper) won't be run, so if there's any aspect of the project that relies on plugins it won't work). I think with Team Suite or Ultimate going to Professional you should be OK.

Answer 2

You will not be able to use features from the more expensive versions but there are no problems working with everything else.

I have a solution here that contains project types I can't use but I can compile and run everything else.

Answer 3

Nope, there are no issues with moving from Team System / Team Suite to Professional. I have a Professional license at home and a Team System license at work - they interchange and work perfectly with each other.

First hand experience shows no issues.

This is, of course, assuming that you aren't using any of the Team System specific features such as the Team Foundation Server or the Testing capabilities of Team System.