Upgrading from Visual Studio 2008 to 2015 - what worries should I have? [closed]

Question

I have just taken over ownership of some apps in a new job - mainly consisting of C# & ASP.Net web projects, targeting .Net Framework 3.5.

Currently the company uses VS 2008 for the solutions, I'd like to look at upgrading to 2015.

Can I easily do this without making any breaking changes to the compiled code? What problems might I expect to come across? And if all goes ok, how can I be sure that the new compiled code is identical to the old?

Answer 1

(Disclaimer: I worked on Visual Studio at Microsoft)

VS2015 is almost fully backwards-compatible with VS2008, including support for .NET 2.0 projects, though note a few things:

• .NET Smart Device projects (.NET Compact Framework / Windows CE) are not supported, VS2008 is the last version of VS to support them
• The code editor no-longer indents empty lines (this change was introduced in VS2010 and it still irritates me, personally)
• VS2015 does support round-tripping projects between different versions of VS (i.e. no more forced project upgrades) however this does not stretch back to 2008, I recall 2010 SP1 is the earliest project version you can open in VS2015 without needing to resave
• IDE support for ASP.NET MVC does not include support for generating ASPX-engine views from within the GUI, all menu items create Razor views instead, though the IDE still supports using ASPX views in MVC projects (just copy+paste files, I guess)
• The Help / Documentation system was overhauled in Visual Studio 2010 when they moved from Microsoft Document Explorer to a small web-server that you access with your browser, but user backlash forced Microsoft to add the (new) Microsoft Help Viewer in Visual Studio 2012 - the experience isn't as good as it was under 2008 (in my opinion).

Otherwise, there's nothing else you need to worry yourself over.

That's pretty much it :)