Does Visual Studio 2010 RC play nice with Visual Studio 2008?

Question

Does Visual Studio 2010 RC play nicely with Visual Studio 2008?

I am wondering if I need to setup a Virtual Machine to play with VS 2010 or if I can just install it on my Dev machine.

If it messes up VS 2010 then that is sad but ok. If it messed up VS 2008 then I would be in trouble.

Has anyone tried this out? Does it work well? Poorly?

Thanks for any answers.

Answer 1

I've had no problems. Microsoft has designed the last several versions of Visual Studio to be able to co-exist side-by-side.

That said, VS 2010 is an RC, so it is still a pre-release. And even after it goes RTM, it's still a complex product and like any complex software install there can be bugs. I wouldn't expect serious problems, but there's always the fraction of a percent that do run into issues. So I'd still plan to install it on a day when you'd have cycles to deal with potential issues (if nothing else, installing it on my machine that hadn't had OS updates installed in a while required at least 2 reboots).

Answer 2

Yes this works and is a supported scenario. My advice is to install 2008 first then 2010. This is the setup i have on multiple computers.

Answer 3

has worked for me without any issues so far. I would follow JaredPar's advice though, install 2008 first, then 2010.

Answer 4

I never trust the "plays nice with others" claims because I've been bit by it before. They supposedly co-exist, but I still put it in a VM.

See this blog post. Visual Studio 2010 / .NET Framework 4 RC Ready for General Download

Answer 5

I haven't installed it on my machine but my manager has and after we looked at it we decided it's best not to go there yet for two reasons:

1) We have to go through the whole conversion process again, which after our experience with 1.1 -> 2.0 wasn't very enticing.

2) We caused an error within the first couple minutes of playing around that worked fine on VS2008 leading us to believe it's not quite ready for primetime yet anyways. (It was adding a method in the class diagram that caused VS to crash for some reason).

Just my two cents though.

edit: I just found another great example, fifth one down: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Tell-a-programmer.aspx