views:

500

answers:

11

Does Visual Studio 2010 RC play nicely with Visual Studio 2008?

I am wondering if I need to setup a Virtual Machine to play with VS 2010 or if I can just install it on my Dev machine.

If it messes up VS 2010 then that is sad but ok. If it messed up VS 2008 then I would be in trouble.

Has anyone tried this out? Does it work well? Poorly?

Thanks for any answers.

+11  A: 

I've had no problems. Microsoft has designed the last several versions of Visual Studio to be able to co-exist side-by-side.

That said, VS 2010 is an RC, so it is still a pre-release. And even after it goes RTM, it's still a complex product and like any complex software install there can be bugs. I wouldn't expect serious problems, but there's always the fraction of a percent that do run into issues. So I'd still plan to install it on a day when you'd have cycles to deal with potential issues (if nothing else, installing it on my machine that hadn't had OS updates installed in a while required at least 2 reboots).

Michael Burr
+5  A: 

Yes this works and is a supported scenario. My advice is to install 2008 first then 2010. This is the setup i have on multiple computers.

JaredPar
+3  A: 

has worked for me without any issues so far. I would follow JaredPar's advice though, install 2008 first, then 2010.

Cody C
+1  A: 

I havent go into too much testing with my VS 2008 projects in 2010, but it does look like it works fine with VS 2010 RC.

Also, both versions seem to run fine on my machine. (I have also VS 2003 on my local as well)

Bearing in mind its the Release Candidate version, is should be very reliable in this area.

kevchadders
+3  A: 

I never trust the "plays nice with others" claims because I've been bit by it before. They supposedly co-exist, but I still put it in a VM.

See this blog post. Visual Studio 2010 / .NET Framework 4 RC Ready for General Download

billb
+1  A: 

I've had no problems either. And I didn't with VS2010 beta 2 and VS2008 either.

klausbyskov
+1  A: 

I have both of them on my machine, so far no problems

SQLMenace
+3  A: 

I haven't installed it on my machine but my manager has and after we looked at it we decided it's best not to go there yet for two reasons:

1) We have to go through the whole conversion process again, which after our experience with 1.1 -> 2.0 wasn't very enticing.

2) We caused an error within the first couple minutes of playing around that worked fine on VS2008 leading us to believe it's not quite ready for primetime yet anyways. (It was adding a method in the class diagram that caused VS to crash for some reason).

Just my two cents though.

edit: I just found another great example, fifth one down: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Tell-a-programmer.aspx

Jeff Keslinke
@Jeff: all due respect, but it's not very clever to judge the 3.5 to 4.0 transition by the 1.1 to 2.0 transition from seven years ago. They learned their lessons from that, as just about everyone else answering this question can attest.
John Saunders
@Jeff: Just because you install both doesn't mean you have to convert all your projects. You can still use VS2008 for your ongoing projects and VS2010 for anything new.
Cody C
You've never needed to upgrade your projects to the new framework versions. I can create a VS2010 project targeting 1.x if I want.
Nick Bedford
+1  A: 

I've run into an error with IIS and VS2010 -- it's solved by re-running the .NET 3.5 version of aspnet_regiis.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsprereleaseannouncements/thread/44dfcf76-bede-4f96-a556-b219a18b6116

Jimmy
A: 

I installed 2010 with 2008 already installed. I had tons of hangs, crashes and general malfunctions. Reinstalling 2008 didn't help until I removed every trace of 2010 from registry.

asdfaaa
Which release of 2010? Beta 1 or beta 2?
John Saunders
A: 

I've installed 2010 with 2008 on this machine for silverlight development.. I haven't noticed any problems except for file associations all goto the 2010 version rather than what I'd prefer opened in 2008 by default. (2010 to me is much slower than 2008)

Earlz