Visual Studio 2010 RC with .net 4 beta 2

Question

Does anyone know if it is possible to use Visual Studio 2010 RC with the beta 2 version of the .NET 4 framework? The reason I need to use the beta 2 version and not the RC is that there isn't an Expression Blend that can support the .NET 4 RC.

I uninstalled the .NET 4 framework that installed with Visual Studio 2010, then I reinstalled the .NET 4 version Beta 2. But now when I launch Visual Studio, I get an error message saying "The operation could not be completed" and it shuts down.

How can I make this work? Thanks!

Answer 1

This is not possible. Visual Studio is tied to specific builds of the CLR. In the case of 2010 RC, it is tied to the RC version of CLR 4.0.

A bit more of the reason behind this.

Visual Studio itself is not special in this way. The vast majority of applications that target the RC version of CLR 4.0 will fail to run on the Beta2 bits. It is the default behavior [1]

There are many changes that went into the CLR between Beta2 and RC. Many of which are depended on by Visual Studio. Even if you could get VS to start on the Beta2 bits it would quickly crash due to changed behavior or missing APIs.

[1] I'm sure there is a bit of hackery you could do to get a very simple program from RC to run on the Beta2 bits. But it's certainly not supported and won't work for even a moderately complex program.