Is it possible to somehow upgrade .NET versions without upgrading Visual Studio versions?

Question

I currently use Visual Studio 2005 for all my personal projects, which means I'm also working with the .NET 2.0 framework. As one could imagine, it's getting that outdated feeling to it. I got this version of VS for free through MSDN's academic alliance program when I was in school. Now that I'm out of school, I sadly don't have access to MSDNAA so software is no longer free.

This brings us to my question. I've been eyeballing some of the new features in the current versions of .NET. Is it at all possible to upgrade VS2005 to use .NET 3.5, or is it hardwired to only work with 2.0?

Answer 1

No, you can't use VS2005 with .NET 3.5. However, you could certainly download onoe of the Visual Studio 2008 Express editions for free. That can co-exist with Visual Studio 2005 with no problem.

That's certainly what I'd go with - even if you could somehow get VS2005 to work against the 3.5 framework, you wouldn't get the language features.

Answer 2

Visual Studio 2008 allows you to easily switch between .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 using the target framework under the project properties window.

Download Visual Studio 2008 Express

Darn, i just been Jon Skeeted......

Answer 3

The really good new features are in the languages, especially Linq in VB and C#. The old IDE will get very confused trying to provide intellisense for them, even if you could get it to launch the new compiler. So I think this unlikely to work well.

Answer 4

You can use the .NET 3.5 libraries from within VS 2005, but the environment and compiler is not setup to take advantage of them. This makes working with many of the 3.5 features very difficult (not worth it at all, usually).

In some cases, this is fine, though. If you are only after access to one or two features in 3.5, referencing those parts of the framework can work fine.

In general, I'd recommend using VS 2008 Express instead.