What to look out for when moving from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008?

Question

We're planning on updating our developers from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008. Are there any common "gotchas" to look out for during this move?

My major concern at the moment is that we use WSE 3.0 quite a bit (mostly to consume external .asmx web services, but we also host a few ourselves). Will that be an issue since WSE 3.0 has been replaced by WCF?

Additional background info: VB.NET application with several web sites, not web applications. Currently using .NET 2.0 with plans to upgrade to 3.5 soon as well.

Anything else we should be concerned about?

Answer 1

I think the main issue you have to watch out for is upgrading teams. Once you upgrade to a new version of Visual Studio, you will be forced to upgrade your project files as well. Once the upgrade is complete the file will no longer be compatible with previous versions of Visual Studio. This means that you will break anyone who is using the previous version of VS to develop. The best advise is to upgrade the entire team.

The best way to work around this is to keep 2 versions of the project file around. One for the previous version of Visual Studio and the other for the current. This obviously has a bit of overhead. And Once you actually start using new language features this will no longer be a sufficient as the new features likely won't compile in the old versions of Visual Studio.

Answer 2

The changes in the visual editor for things like ASP.NET projects (especially when it comes to styling elements) is very different and can be incredibly frustrating at first.

Answer 3

I've found VS05-08 migration pretty painless. In theory, you should be able to simply open the 2005 solution in VS2008, let it convert, and everything just works. VS2008 lets you 'target' a specific version of .NET, and the default here would be that it continues to target .NET 2.0. That said, 3.5 is an additive update, so there should be little or no breaking changes to any .NET 2.0 code should you change to 3.5 (which is just a drop-down-box to change). I'm pretty sure the WSE stuff should "just work".

In practice, things like project templates, dependencies, etc. could be an issue. Web sites and web applications are still both supported, so I think that shouldn't be an issue either.

In the end, just make a backup of everything, then open in VS2008 and see what happens.