Is there any risk in upgrading from VS2010 to VS2012 in the middle of project development?

Question

I have been working on a rather large project for approximately two years in VS2010. I just got a license for VS2012 but I have some fears regarding what may happen if I remove VS2010 and attempt to work on the project in VS2012.

Is this an irrational fear or can there be issues getting the project to compile? My project is a C#, .Net 4, Winforms application.

Ideally I would just load VS2012 on another computer and give it a try, but I'm running short on computers at the current moment in time. And I've read about some downfalls to having VS2010 and VS2012 installed jointly.

Answer 1

I had no problems updating from 2010 to 2012. In work our main project (250,000 lines of code) has people working on it in both VS 2010 and VS 2012, and there's no issue committing (using Git, if that makes any difference).

There have been projects that won't update from 2008 to 2012 without complications, but in my experience, 2010-2012 has been pretty seamless.

Answer 2

Visual Studio 2012 will not change the fact that your project is a WinForms C# project targeting .Net Framework 4.0.

In my experience, the only change 2012 made to a 2010 solution was in the first few lines of the solution file.

Answer 3

Making a change like this increases the failure chances of the project, even when it's a necessary change. I'd say if it's not broken, don't fix it. While it is nice to work with the most recent tools, making a tool change for the sake of a tool change in an ongoing project of size is generally too risky. It would be best to wait until you reach a delivery milestone, release the product, then devote a development cycle, probably a short one, to the tool upgrade.

With that said, in general, VS2010 to VS2012 is a lot smoother than VS2008 to VS2010. The only problems I've encountered with it were straightening out some references that didn't carry over correctly on some projects and difficulties communicating wih an old version of TFS server (switching to a newer server fixed that one).

I've had both VS2010 and VS2012 on more than one system (along with VS2005 and VS2008 in some cases) with no issues.