How to downgrade solution from Visual Studio 2010 to Visual Studio 2005?

Question

I have a huge Visual Studio 2010 solution. I work with Visual Studio 2005, so I want to convert the solution to the desired version. Basically, it's a portable C++ code so it should compile on Visual Studio 2005 too. Changing the version in the *.sln file doesn't help because the *.vcxproj format is completely different from the old *.vcproj format.

Recreating the solution by hand is not an option because of its size. Also there may be some non-default compiler flags, dependencies, etc. that I don't know of (and I can't look through ALL this XML junk that I don't understand).

There is already a related question on How Do I Downgrade a C++ Visual Studio 2008 Project to 2005. However, the utility suggested there supports at most Visual Studio 2008.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

It really totally sucks, that every proprietary IDE today thinks it needs to create its own project file format. "Dear IDE developers, just use Makefiles and create a nice GUI for it so that also people without Makefile knowledge can use it!" In VS6 it was at least possible to import/export Makefiles, but not today anymore. And it was possible to use nmake for automated builds. No IDE needed to be installed, just the toolchain which could be grabbed by a simple checkout without installation.

I use CMake now. It's free, it's cross-platform, it is well supported in free IDEs like KDevelop, QtCreator, etc. It can generate Makefiles and Visual Studio projects. So you maintain only one project source, the CMakeLists.txt file and can work with any IDE. No pain with different versions of Visual Studio or with other proprietary project file formats. This way you can generate or VS projects for developing and you can generate Makefiles for commandline builds using nmake like in the good old days.

BTW, it's much easier to change settings in a CMakeLists.txt than clicking through various GUI dialogs. But this is a matter of personal preferences.

Answer 2

In my work made a utility which utilized the EnvDTE.dll and scanned a vcproj-file and optionally all vcproj-files within a sln-file. It compared all settings with a "template" and would issue a warning or optionally update the setting to correct values. We used this utility so that settings would be verified to be correct and consistent throughout all projects. I haven't updated the utility to 2010 yet due to other priorities.

EnvDTE hasn't changed much from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010. Perhaps it is possible to create a simple utility which opens the vcxproj-file using DTE100 and saves it using DTE90, or earlier.