Can Visual Studio target earlier C# syntax in addition to earlier .NET framework versions?

Question

The easy part:

Targeting the .NET 2.0 framework in a Visual Studio 2010 project using the dropdown.

The hard part:

Is it possible to target a specific syntax version - for example var s = "hello world" is valid syntactic sugar in VS2008 and above, but would not compile in VS2005. Can VS2010 be configured to flag this at compile time?

Answer 1

This can be done by specifying the language version in the project settings. To set the language version to C# 2.0 do the following

• Right Click on the project and select "Properties"
• Go to the "Build" Tab
• Click the "Advanced" Button
• Change the "Language Version" drop down to "ISO-2"

Here are the other selections and their meanings in Visual Studio 2010.

• ISO-1: C# 1.0 / Visual Studio RTM and 2003
• ISO-2: C# 2.0 / Visual Studio 2005
• C# 3.0: C# 3.0 / Visual Studio 2008
• default: C# 4.0 / Visual Studio 2010