Is it possible to build .NET 1.1 apps with VS.NET 2008?

Question

I'm going to maintain an existing .NET 1.1 app for my client. VS.NET 2008 seems not to be able to build .NET 1.1 projects out-of-the-box but I don't want to install VS.NET 2003 just for this particular project. Is it possible to use VS.NET 2008 for .NET 1.1 development? How?

Answer 1

In my experience, quick answer is "no". I strongly suggest you install VS.Net 2003 as it happily co-exists with 2008 (We do that on all our machines here).

Even if you got it to build in 2008 from the command line, you'll still miss all the IntelliSense and wizards.

Answer 2

According to Luke H's blog, no:

No - Visual Studio 2008 will not support targeting .Net Framework 1.1. This is something we really wanted to be able to support - since we know there are a lot of .NET developers working on .NET 1.1 applications. However, it would have been significantly more difficult to go back and support .NET 1.1 which was a substantially different runtime.

Thus, to fit in this release, the decision ended up being either to not support multitargeting at all - or to support only targeting .NET2.0 and greater. Because we really wanted Visual Studio 2008 to be a great tool for at least both .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 - we decided to put in the most multitargeting support we could fit in this release.

http://blogs.msdn.com/lukeh/archive/2007/06/29/net-framework-multitargeting-in-visual-studio-2008-aka-orcas.aspx#3627411

Answer 3

如果确实需要使用1.1，则只需确保不使用任何2.0功能（例如泛型和大量其他好东西），然后使用1.1目录中的csc.exe或vbc.exe编译器进行编译。

Answer 4

I posted a similar question recently about upgrading an ASP.NET 1.1 project to 3.5, and ended up deciding to upgrade the project to VS 2008, just using an import wizard. The process was surprisingly simple; in my case, with a relatively straightforward Web project consisting of a few dozen Web forms, the process took only a couple of minutes, and I was relieved not to have encountered a single exception in testing afterward.

Answer 5

If your code matches certain requirements,

1. No partial,
2. No generics,
3. ......

You may try out MSBee here

http://www.codeplex.com/MSBee

It would be very complicated while installing VS2003 is a much easier option.