Converting to Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5

Question

The process of converting from Visual Studio .NET 2003 to Visual Studio 2008 is satisfyingly start forward.

I thought it would be worth asking a couple of questions though:

1) Are there any 'gotchas' with this conversion process that we should be aware of?

2) Same question goes for upgrading the .NET Framework from 1.1 to 3.5?

Thanks.

Answer 1

There are two things I remember that hit us from back when we moved from 2003 to 2005:

• smtp e-mail is in a different place (iirc system.net vs system.web)
• asp.net has a completely different compilation model, and so web site may need a lot of work to get them to where you want them

Also, I recommend immediately going through your code base and replacing any ArrayLists with generic Lists and interfaces. Not because things won't work or for the performance, but to enable you to interact with the old code more easily. It sucks to have new code with a nice generic IEnumerable<T> instance (perhaps the result of a linq expression) and to need to convert to an ArrayList to pass it to an old function.

I'm probably missing a few things, but otherwise things should for the most part just work.