Visual Studio 2008 projects from Visual Studio 2010 without conversion

Question

Is there a way? Can I use and build Visual Studio 2008 projects from Visual Studio 2010 without conversion?

I found this explanation:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2010/03/15/why-does-visual-studio-2010-convert-my-projects.aspx

Is there any "hack" for this? :)

In my team, we need this in order to work on same VS version of project(source is on svn) and from different IDE's.

Answer 1

I don't think you can go that way - but you can load VS2010 projects in VS2008. Take a backup of the 2008 solution, let VS2010 do the conversion, and then load the 2008 solution again. There will be warnings that it's using an unknown tool version, but so long as your projects are "simple" (don't use any 2010-specific stuff) it should work.

I use this technique for Noda Time, with solutions of "Noda Time VS2008.sln" and "Noda Time VS2010.sln". Using the same project files for both solutions is a real boon - it means you don't need to remember to add source files to "the other" project when you're adding them to one.

Answer 2

Fairly sure that that's not possible. But possibly you could have two project/solution files linking the exact same files, one called xxx8.sln and the other xxx10.sln and then you could use the correct one according to your needs. If you make a point of only adding things in the 2008 one, you could just do a new conversion when needed. Otherwise maybe you could write a small tool to copy changes from one to the other. I think the solution files haven't changed very much.