Can anything make life easier for a dotnet 3.5 coder trapped in a 1.1 world?

Question

I have to spend a fair portion of my time developing in dotnet 1.1, and as I'm sure anyone in a similar position will appreciate, the more I get used dotnet 2.0 and above, the more annoying it is to go back to the early version. I'm getting increasingly fed up of messing about with ArrayLists and the like when I want to be working with Generics and ideally doing so with Linq.

Can anyone recommend any tools, techniques, libraries or anything at all to help make dotnet 1.1 life more bearable, especially with reference to the collection processing shortcomings mentioned above?

Answer 1

I recently joined a company that was coding in 1.1. I decided to take the app and port it over to .Net 3.5 on my own time and present it to the group. As a result, we're just about to release a 3.5 version that opens up nicely in VS2008. Probably not what you're looking for, but that's how I dealt with the same issue.

Answer 2

Hmm, is upgrading the .NET 1.1 application that you've to maintain to .NET2.0 not an option ?

In 2004, I've started development of a .NET application. This was in .NET 1.1.

Last year, we've decided to 'convert' that application to .NET2.0 using VS.NET 2008, and we haven't run into any major problems.

All existing code still runs, and when new developments have to be done on the project, we can take advantage of all .NET2.0 goodies (and, since we're working in VS.NET 2008, we can also make use of C# 3.0 goodies (automatic properties, lambda's, ... ).

I always work with 'Set warnings as errors', and for this project, I've to disable this feature, since some parts of the .NET 1.1 framework have been marked as 'Obsolete'. Although those classes still work, the compiler generates a warning saying that class X is obsolete, and you should use class Y instead.
But, this is not a big problem, as you can gradually respond to those messages and adapt your code.

Answer 3

Tools: only one Microsoft's Support Liftcycle for .NET 1.1 at http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=1249

Which shows .NET 1.1 is already into "extended" (i.e. limited) support.