Are Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2012 solutions"compatible"?

Question

I edited my project (which was written in school using Visual Studio 2008) at home using Visual Studio 2010 Express. When I got back to school, I couldn't open my solution anymore as Visual Studio 2008 told me that the file was created with a newer version of Visual Studio. I asked my professor for help and he edited something in the assembly information of the solution and voila, I could open, run, edit it again as nothing ever happened.

However, I forgot what he did with the assembly information. Does anyone here know what he could have done? or is this approach not advisable?

Answer 1

At the top of the .sln file there would be a line:

Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 11.00

If you change the version to 10.00, it would correspond to Visual Studio 2008. Use any text editor for this.

The file format has not changed in between these versions (nor has it for Visual Studio 2012).

Answer 2

Edit the .sln file in Notepad and find the version number (11.0) on the first or second line. Change it to 10.0, save the file, and you should be good to go.