Running Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010 on same system

Question

I have around 50 projects in Visual Studio 2005 that I am building a new development machine for and I'd like to slowly move those projects to VS 2008 but also have 2010 available for select new projects.

Can this work? Are there any gotchas for this sort of setup? Any general advice for running multiple versions of Visual Studio on the same system would be greatly appreciated. Specifically related to managing a controlled migration of projects to new versions but being able to selectively keep some on old versions.

Answer 1

I've got 7.1, 8, and 9 installed at the same time (well, and VB part of 6 as well) and I've not really had a problem opening projects file in the wrong version. The Visual Studio Solution files is "associated" with a particular version even if they all have the same extension of .sln, as you can see from its little icon. Microsoft Visual Studio Version Selector seems to handle individual project files (.vcproj) fine as well.

The only thing I've had is the individual source code files not opening up in the latest version like I want, but that's easily fixed with the click of a little button in VS Opions.

Microsoft have this to say:

Visual Studio supports the installation of Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003, ... on the same computer.

In general, you should install the earliest release of Visual Studio first, and then install subsequent versions of Visual Studio in the order in which they were released.