Are there any known issues of VS 2003/2005 and 2008 coexisting?

Question

Does anyone know of any issues with VS 2003/2005 and 2008 co-existing on the same install.

The registry hives are all separated and the .net frameworks all have their own locations. Only issue I can think of is the Web support (which can either be 1.1 or 2.0 but not both)

Am I missing anything? Am I going to run into trouble?

EDIT

I followed the sequence 2003, 2008 , 2005 , 2005 SP1 and had Web Application Projects missing. Can anyone else confirm if this is an issue? I have since resolved it, by installing WAP manually, but it is supposed to be included in SP1.

See: this link for a discussion about missing items in 2005

Answer 1

Nope. That's a Microsoft Supported Configuration.

You're better off installing them in chronological order, but in my experience it works fine if you don't install them in order.

Answer 2

I've had all three installed on my system in the past and everything functioned properly.

Though I think you'll find it's easier to update all your 2005 projects to 2008 and eliminate one of them since there weren't a lot of changes that affected code between the two.

Answer 3

My work computer has VS2003, VS2005, and VS2008 installed. They all work without problems. At home, I decided that I only needed VS2008, since I don't use .NET 1.1 anymore. VS2008 has the ability to target .NET 2.0 and above by changing a setting in the project properties tab.

Web support is done within the IDE and in IIS. This is a per web application setting. This means that having all three Visual Studio versions will not hinder the ability to use the web development features. Just be mindful that each version uses web projects in a slightly different way.

The only thing that I would caution you about is to be careful of installing any of the SQL Server Express editions that come with VS2005 and VS2008. SQL Server Express 2008 has consistently clobbered the SQL Server Express 2005 installations, even when I installed them on different directories.

Answer 4

I've had at least two of them installed on the same box and not had a problem. The prject types can act funky though if you aren't carefull.

You may want to do your development in virtual images regardless. I started doing this because I had differant clients with all kinds of differant configurations.

Answer 5

The only problem might be that you wouldn't really know for sure where command line utilities is executed from. This might cost you a couple dozens of braincells when you're trying to compile something with "make".