Can I write an app in the new version of Visual Studio and make it compatible with .NET Framework 1.1

Question

I am a Web developer who spends 99% of his time in Linux, but I need to develop a super simple application with VB or possibly C# (.Net). The only version of Visual Studio I have is the most current free ones. There MIGHT be a copy of 2001 lying around somewhere. Anyways, the machine I need to develop this for is running Windows NT4. I cannot change this because another piece of software runs on that requires it.

Is there a way to develop an app with the new VS and keep it compatible with such an old version of the .Net framework (1.1)?

If nothing else I could install Perl on the machine and write a command line type script, but given the people that will be using it GUI would be better.

Answer 1

I don't believe you can target .Net 1.1 in Visual Studio 2008. Here's one of the developer's explanations, from a comment in this blog entry:

Visual Studio 2008 will not support targeting .Net Framework 1.1. This is something we really wanted to be able to support - since we know there are a lot of .NET developers working on .NET 1.1 applications. However, it would have been significantly more difficult to go back and support .NET 1.1 which was a substantially different runtime.

Thus, to fit in this release, the decision ended up being either to not support multitargeting at all - or to support only targeting .NET2.0 and greater. Because we really wanted Visual Studio 2008 to be a great tool for at least both .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 - we decided to put in the most multitargeting support we could fit in this release.

Answer 2

Have you tried MSBee? This is an add-on to VS2005 (well, strictly speaking: MSBuild in 2.0), but it may well work with VS2008 too. Of course, you can always use the IDE to write code, and simply use MSBuild from the 2.0 folder to build...

Either way, if you target .NET 1.1, you can only use .NET 1.1 / C# 1.2 features.

Personally, I'd target 3.5SP1, using (if it needs to be free) C# Express 2008. (I've removed this since you need to target such an old OS)

Answer 3

You can use vs.net 2008 to write code that is able to run on .net v1.1 but the IDE won't give you any hints on what will work etc.

You will be stuck using inline asp.net for a model. (or compile using the commandline tools)

There are a lot of examples using this method here: http://www.learnasp.com/freebook/learn/

This code is all v1.1 except for the explicit naming of the v2 examples.